Sunday, September 24, 2000
Paterno doesn't deserve this
COLUMBUS — A few minutes after his ultimate indignity, after the most one-sided loss of his long career, Joe Paterno sat down and muttered into a dead microphone.
His voice was as soft as a down comforter and his eyes roamed the room without stopping to focus. Penn State's enduring football coach was present and yet elsewhere, preoccupied with an injured freshman and rebuilding plans he had yet to formulate. He wore a faraway look and a pair of tattered trousers in the wake of Saturday's 45-6 loss to Ohio State, and for once looked every bit as old as his birth certificate.
“I don't want to go shooting my mouth off,” the 73-year-old coach said. “I don't want to start criticizing people when I don't know what I'm going to do. It's not always their fault. And you have to have a better player to replace them with, or one as good.”
In 35 years as a college football institution, Paterno has never been confronted with a comparable crisis. He started the season needing seven victories to surpass Bear Bryant as the winningest major-college coach, but his Nittany Lions are 1-4, and are likely to lose more games this fall than they did during Richard Nixon's first term (six).
Worse, they're losing ugly. Penn State has been toppled by Toledo and shut out by Pittsburgh and was overwhelmed Saturday by an unremarkable Ohio State team.
“I thought after last week that was the bottom,” senior defensive end Justin Kurpeikis said. “I think today we dug a few feet deeper.”
"It doesn't seem right'
Every football power has its fallow periods. Players get hurt. Some don't pan out. Sometimes your best players go 1-2 in the NFL draft (as Penn State's Courtney Brown and LaVar Arrington did last year).
Sometimes the ball takes peculiar bounces. Steve Bellisari's first-quarter touchdown pass was tipped twice by other players before it finally was seized by Buckeye tight end Darnell Sanders. In a tight game, such a play could be crucial. Saturday, however, it was of no consequence.
There was no strategy to second-guess, no blunder worth belaboring. This was a simple question of talent. If the two teams played 10 times, Penn State might wish to forfeit the last five.
“It really seems like a dream,” said senior tackle Kareem McKenzie. “You want to come out of it. It doesn't seem right at all for a Penn State team.”
He deserves better
It really doesn't seem right for Paterno, who has been college football's classiest act almost since the day in 1950 when he showed up in State College to assist Rip Engle. Paterno has succeeded without scandal, endured without embarrassment and sought to teach his players more than blocking and tackling.
“Just winning is a silly reason to be serious about a game,” he wrote in his memoir, Paterno: By the Book. “For a kid still in school, devotion to winning football games at nearly any cost may cripple his mind for life ... The purpose of college football is to serve education, not the other way around.”
To that end, Paterno and his wife have donated more than $4 million to the university. Earlier this month, a new campus library was dedicated in his name.
Is it time to close the book on his career? Joe Paterno just signed a new five-year contract in January.
“These are tough days,” he said Saturday. “I have to keep my head. I'm not going to say I'm going to do this or that and I'm not going to say if I think we can play harder. I know we have to play better football. How we're going to do that, I just don't know.”
E-mail: tsullivan@enquirer.com.
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