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AFM Magazine

AFM Magazine


Heart of a Lion: Joe Paterno

by: Steve Silverman
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Football is a funny business. It is a war-like game in which the biggest, strongest and toughest will often come out on top. Throw in the elements of brains and intelligence and it can either amplify the preceding characteristic or eliminate it.

The teams on the sidelines – on a given autumn afternoon or evening – want to humiliate, eliminate and defeat their opposite numbers. It is the most competitive of all sports.

Yet there is a fraternity among its players and coaches that often belie the traits mentioned above. Make nice conversation with your enemy in the winter and you may be welcomed with open arms.

Take the Penn State coaching staff. After suffering through a fourth losing season in the previous five years, Joe Paterno, offensive coordinator Galen Hall and quarterback coach Jay Paterno wanted to infuse their stagnant offense with life. They knew they had an athletic and mobile quarterback coming back in Michael Robinson along with a group of speedy freshmen receivers and they wanted to figure out a way to get the most out of them.

A call was placed to Austin, Texas, where Mack Brown’s Longhorns were making great use of their mobile quarterback Vince Young. The Penn State coaching staff wanted to adopt some of the principles of the spread offense Texas was using in order to make their offense a much more dangerous commodity.

That phone call started a chain of events that led to a turnaround for Penn State that transformed a 4-7 team to Big Ten champions. The Nittany Lions won 10 of 11 regular-season games and their only loss came on the last play of their game at Michigan. If not for a referee’s decision to put a few extra seconds on the clock in the last minute of the game the Nittany Lions could have been undefeated.

It was a remarkable season that earned Joe Paterno the Schutt Sports Divison I-A Coach of the Year award.

“It’s a great honor for the staff and squad,” Paterno said. “After last year I said if I can just keep my coaches together we’ll be okay. They’re the guys who have done a great job. It’s a misnomer, selecting a Coach of the Year. It should be the Staff of the Year.”

The hallmark of Paterno’s career has been his relentless honesty and that remains true to this day. But let’s return to the back story in Austin…

…On Feb. 23, Penn State’s offensive coaches flew to Austin, meeting for two days with the Longhorns. The Texas coaching staff welcomed their cohorts from western Pennsylvania like long lost brothers.

Texas offensive coordinator Gregg Davis explained how his team created space for Young. Davis opened up the Longhorns’ playbook and illustrated how opposing defenses often lined up against them.

“They told us they had an athletic quarterback, and they wanted to look at some of the things we did in terms of techniques,” Davis recalled.

By spring practice, Penn State coaches realized the potential of three- and four-receiver sets, provided the young players – and Robinson, a senior, but also in his first year as a full-time quarterback – could grasp the offense quickly enough. Almost immediately, players salivated over the idea of a wide-open passing game. After all, several of them had signed with the Nittany Lions hoping, eventually, to upgrade Penn State’s tattered image. So how better to do it than by upramping the offense itself?

Coaches, first, presented a warning – half-threatening, half-challenging. “Hey look,” Jay Paterno recalled telling the wideouts, “this four-wideout offense will be great, but we want to run the ball, too. And, if you guys cannot block out on the perimeter, we have no running game.”

Hall and receivers coach Mike McQueary asked the wideouts to work tirelessly on their blocking. They watched film. They fumed through drills. Led by Derrick Williams and sophomore Terrell Golden – the best blockers, initially -- the group improved, slowly convincing the coaches that Robinson and tailback Tony Hunt could run the ball exceptionally, even in formations without a fullback or tight end.

“I think when we first started in the spring, we were just kind of toying with the [spread] offense,” wide receiver Deon Butler said. “I think coach Hall just wanted to see if we could handle it. One of the bigger factors was our downfield blocking.”

Hall redesigned the offense without altering much of the playbook. Only 10 percent of the plays this season are new; mostly, Penn State coaches relied on taking the same routes and blocking schemes and applied them to redesigned formations.

“That was the greatest challenge to us,” Jay Paterno said.

“We knew we didn’t have to reinvent the wheel. We didn’t want a guy like Robinson coming back in the spring and saying, ‘Wow, this thing is all new.’”

Instead, Penn State pulled off an exceptional bit of theater – its offense only looked new. After an offseason of recruiting and position changes, the Lions finally gathered the collection of wideouts they had lacked for years.

Freshman Jordan Norwood found space in underneath routes with uncanny instinct. Redshirt freshman Butler showed flashes of big-play potential. Freshman Justin King, though also practicing as a defensive back, allowed Penn State to experiment with deep passes and reverses. He, along with Williams, were the speedsters of the group.

Still, as the season approached, uncertainty permeated the atmosphere. “I think we are going to be a little bit more wide open,” Joe Paterno said at one point in August. Still, he cautioned, “we have to play that a little bit by ear.”

After starting the season with wins over South Florida and Cincinnati, the Nittany Lions accelerated the pace of their progress and rampaged through the rest of the season. Penn State used three wideouts on -50 percent of its plays. Four receivers spread the field on another 15 percent. The Lions have taken the Texas offensive gameplan and learned it, practiced it and become expert at it.

Robinson became one of the best players in the Big Ten. He threw for 2,097 yards and 16 touchdowns while rushing for 785 yards and 11 scores. The Penn State offense was built in the image of its super-athletic quarterback and the unit had the ability to score from any place on the field.

Robinson helped open up the running lanes for Tony Hunt, who came out of nowhere to rush for 1,047 yards and average 6.0 yards per carry. The Penn State running game gave the offense the balance that Paterno has always craved.

While the offense was reinventing itself, defensive coordinator Tom Bradley was sticking with the 4-3 defense that has been the signature of the Nittany Lions. With sterling performers like defensive end Tamba Hali, linebacker Paul Posluszny and cornerback Alan Zemaitis, Bradley did not have to make changes.

All the Lion defense needed was an offense that could carry its weight, make plays and get the ball in the endzone. Penn State had been held to 10 points or less on six occasions in 2004 and the Nittany Lions lost all of those games. When Penn State had scored 13 or more, the team had gone 4-1.

Penn State has had one of the most consistent defensive teams in the country this season. They rank in the top 20 in scoring defense (11th), run defense (12th), pass efficiency defense (16th) and total defense (17th). Posluszny was simply sensational, winning the Butkus Award with 111 tackles, 11.0 tackles for loss and 3.0 sacks.

How good was Posluszny? So good that former Nittany Lion and NFL Hall of Famer Jack Ham declared that Posluszny was the “best of all the great Penn State linebackers.”

It’s hard to explain what a great honor this is,” Posluszny said from Orlando. “As a linebacker to win the Butkus Award that’s the tops.

“It’s been a great year for linebackers across the nation and to be recognized with this award, I’m just very surprised by this. One of the reasons why I came to Penn State was to try and continue the great legacy of ‘Linebacker U’. This is hard to fathom.”

The addition of an explosive offense gave the defense a chance to breathe a little bit. It gave Bradley’s unit the knowledge that it did not have to do it alone.

The superb record that ended up giving the Nittany Lions a spot in the Orange Bowl did not reinvigorate the 79-year-old Paterno. He was never “uninvigorated.” However, Paterno recognizes that he has made changes in his coaching routine.

“I spend a little more time with some of the kids and let the coaches handle some of the details and those kinds of things,” Paterno explained. “Invigorated, that is a word I am not quite sure I can identify with. I have enjoyed it and have enjoyed this football team. I have enjoyed the whole group of kids for three years, even when we were losing. I really have.

“It is just a little bit easier for me this year because of the fact that the kids have had some success and I don’t have to constantly build them up. Now they respond a little bit easier and in that sense it is a little easier job.”

Don’t expect to hear any gloating from Paterno. While critics around the country had piously called for his retirement through the years, there is no “I told you so” coming from Paterno.

“To be honest, I really have never thought that way. It’s not my nature,” he said. “I’m not a vindictive guy. I don’t read the papers. I realize the media’s got a job to do and I realize the alumni, if they’re interested in your program, are going to die when you lose and so forth, and a lot of them get carried away,” he said.

“I’ve been around a lot of good football teams and I’ve been in a lot of locker rooms where we’ve felt pretty good about what we had done,” Paterno said. “The kids are the ones that are all fired up and they should be, because they went through all that junk.”

But it was Paterno and his staff that came up with the plan to turn things around. Despite holding the head coaching position since the 1966 season, Paterno was not set in his ways. He saw his team needed to make changes … and changes were made.

Paterno, at the age of 79, defeated inertia. It really wasn’t even a battle. He knew he could not just return to the sidelines and hope things would change. He and his staff took matters into their own hands and found a new solution. That solution returned Penn State to elite status in the world of college football.






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