Bacon - Fourth and Long: The Fight for the Soul of College Football

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To Terry McDonald, Maris Vinovskis, David Rubin, Sharon Dilworth, and Nicholas Delbanco, my mentors at the University of Michigan, who taught me how to do this

Mike Mauti grew up in Mandeville, Louisiana, just outside New Orleans. Mike Zordich grew up in Youngstown, Ohio, on the Pennsylvania border, equidistance from Pittsburgh and Cleveland.

Their fathers both played football for Penn State and went on to play in the NFL. Their dads revered Joe Paterno, as most of Paternos players did. When Mike Mauti was born, in 1990, his dad, Rich, wrote a letter to Paterno, saying his only regret was that his son would never get the chance to play for the legendary coach.

Seventeen years later, in 2007, Mike Mauti made his official recruiting visit to the office of Penn States head coach. But minutes before he did, he met another recruit outside the indoor practice facility: Mike Zordich, whod already committed.

Ill never forget it, Mauti said. The first words out of his mouth are So are you coming or what? Im thinking, You know what? Hes right. But I didnt say anything to him or my dad. I wasnt planning to commit on that trip.

Of course, Mauti came to Penn State, and the two became inseparable.

That friendship would be testedand not by each other, but by the extraordinary circumstances they would face during their years at Penn State. For these two, the moment of truth would arrive in late July 2012.

By 10:00 a.m. Monday morning, July 23, Penn States football players had finished their workout, showered, and gathered in the players lounge to watch NCAA president Mark Emmerts press conference, which was covered by virtually every news outlet in the country.

In a statement the players would long remember, Emmert said, No price the NCAA can levy will repair the grievous damage inflicted by Jerry Sandusky on his victims. However, we can make clear that the culture, actions, and inactions that allowed them to be victimized will not be tolerated in collegiate athletics.

Emmert then laid out a series of penalties. One erased a wide swath of Penn States rich history, vacating all victories from 1998 through 2011thereby dropping Coach Paterno from the perch of his profession, with 409 wins, down to fifth, with 298. The sanctions also threatened Penn States future: a $60 million fine, a four-year postseason ban, and a drastic reduction in the number of scholarships the football coaches could offer recruits, from twenty-five down to fifteen a year, with a maximum of sixty-fivetwenty fewer than Penn States rivals could give out.

Emmert declared Penn States penalties might be considered greater than any other seen in NCAA history. Most experts believed they were second only to the infamous death penalty delivered to Southern Methodist University, from which the Mustangs had still not fully recovered twenty-six years later.

Football, Emmert concluded, will never again be placed ahead of educating, nurturing, and protecting young people.

Eight months earlier, on November 5, 2011, prosecutors had arrested Penn States former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky on forty criminal counts, including the sexual assault of eight boys over a fifteen-year period, one of them in the showers of Penn States football building. That put in motion a series of events that few could have imagined: it exposed the worst scandal in the history of modern sports; it led to the midseason firing of the iconic Joe Paterno; it prompted the hiring of little-known New England Patriots offensive coordinator Bill OBrien; it resulted in Penn States commissioning the Freeh Report, which concluded university leaders knew enough about what Sandusky had done, but cared more about protecting the universitys image than his young victims; and it surely accelerated Paternos decline and deathall within three months of Sanduskys arrest.

Those facts you probably know. What happened behind those headlines, you probably dont.

The players, coaches, and staffers in Penn States players lounge that Monday morning understood immediately that another provision of the NCAAs sanctions, which got far less attention outside that room at the time, threatened Penn States season opener, just six weeks away: the one that allowed other schools to recruit Penn States current players, who would be permitted to play for another team that fall without having to sit out a season for transferring. In practice, Emmert had declared open season for opposing coaches to cannibalize Penn States roster, and all but encouraged Penn States players to jump.

Just minutes after news of the sanctions broke, recalled Mauti, who had already defied the odds by reclaiming his starting position after missing the 2009 season when he tore the ACL in his right knee, and most of the 2011 season when he tore the ACL in his left knee, Our phones were ringingblowing upwith ten or twenty coaches calling right off. My high school coach had to turn his phone off because he got forty calls that day asking if I wanted to jump.

Just a couple hours later, while Mauti met with rookie head coach Bill OBrien to address Mautis fear that the program was on the verge of collapse, University of Southern California assistant coach Ed Orgeron called Mauti. His kid went to my high school, so I picked up, Mauti recalled. He asks me, What kind of guy is your tailback? The coach didnt even know Silas Redds name. Are you serious?

Apparently serious enough to fly Reddwho ran for over a thousand yards in his sophomore yearout to LA, where USC had Snoop Dogg pick him up at the airport in a limousine. Everyone in Penn States players lounge assumed if the popular and talented Redd left State College, the floodgates would open.

That fear was well-founded. That same day, recalled starting senior defensive end Pete Massaro, an Academic All-American econ major, One kid was telling me he was going and started listing a ton of guys in the freshmen and sophomore classes who were going to leave, too. I was freaking out. Next thing he said to me was Penn State football is dead.

I thought it was the end of Penn State football.

So did Mauti and Zordich. As was often the case, they had the same reaction at the same time: this will not happen on my watch.

After barely sleeping that night, they got up the next morning, Tuesday, July 24, at six. They immediately headed for strength coach Craig Fitzgeralds office to meet with him and Coach OBrien, who didnt need to be persuaded about the gravity of their situation.

The seniors compiled a list of people theyd heard were planning to leave, and together they concocted a plan they hoped would stop the exodus before it started.

Before they split up that Tuesday morning, however, OBrien moved to make a major decision.

Coach was saying, We need to make a hard deadline, Zordich recalled. This cant go on forever. So Im going to tell them, by August first, youre either with us or youre not.

It made perfect sense. Not knowing which players would still be on the team for the first game, just six weeks away, would make it almost impossible to conduct an effective practice and could be enough to make an already fragile team fall apart, piece by piece.