Time isn't on Paterno's side

Sporting News, The, Oct 13, 2003 by Matt Hayes

It's the biggest weekend of the season, with the biggest games of the year. And JoePa is nowhere to be found. The road to the national title will be shaped significantly this weekend, and Penn State will be in West Lafayette, Ind., trying not to lose for the third consecutive week.

Joe Paterno suffered one losing season in his first 34 years as coach in Happy valley. Six weeks and a 2-4 record into this season, he's dangerously close to his third in four years. So it begs the question: When should Joe go? And that's the scary part--not if he should go, but when.

For all that he has done at Penn State and all that he means to the game, Joe Paterno deserves a bagful of mulligans. But his team isn't winning, and, what's worse, it looks outcoached and outplayed on a weekly basis. The Nittany Lions are 23-24 in their last 47 games, and in the instant pudding world of sports in the 21st century, that gets you fired before a season is finished.

That won't happen to Paterno, who has earned the right to stay as long as he wants, to fix a mess that becomes more problematic by the week. Paterno will be 77 in December, and he's not going to bail on a program that, if not for a few fortunate plays in nonconference wins over lowly Temple and Kent State, could be 0-for-the season. It hit a new low in last weekend's 30-23 loss to Wisconsin, in which the Lions snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Even sports cliches are discombobulated with this team.

Penn State fumbled a punt and a kickoff. It missed two field-goal attempts and blew an extra point. It allowed a 65-yard punt return for a touchdown and a 55-yard kickoff return to set up another score. That's a lot of maddening mistakes in a game that came down to the last drive.

"It's hard when you have a bunch of kids who work as hard as these kids do," Paterno said while trying to explain away another loss. "And we can't help them win a game."

When a team plays hard and loses, it invariably is pinned to one of two things: ability or coaching. In this case, it's both. Good, prepared teams find ways to win close games. Eight of the Lions' last 10 losses have been by eight points or fewer, which goes a long way in explaining Penn State's sickly status. As for Paterno, forget that theory that the game has passed him by. That's ridiculous. His biggest liability is his greatest strength: He is loyal to a fault. Loyal to longtime assistants who have lost key recruiting battles since the late 1990s; loyal to upperclassmen who shouldn't be playing over more talented underclassmen.

Paterno's four key coaches--defensive coordinator Tom Bradley, offensive coordinator Fran Ganter and offensive line coaches Dick Anderson and Bill Kenney--have a combined 100 years on staff. Proponents would say that's the foundation of continuity and chemistry; cynics would say that's stale coaching, and that if they were among the best in their field, they'd have found head-coaching jobs by now.

The reality is this: Good or bad, these are men Paterno trusts. They follow his ideals and never stray from the course. They also are the core of a staff that should be landing big-time recruits for a university that, essentially, should recruit itself. Instead, Penn State has struggled of late in the key Pennsylvania-Ohio recruiting ground, losing out on impact players and watching little brother Pittsburgh reemerge on the college football map with sparkling facilities and a young, energetic staff that relates to the me-first high school player.

That's not to say the Lions don't land blue-chip recruits. But when they do, their development is stifled at times because of the staff's loyalty to upperclassmen. A perfect example is tailback Larry Johnson, a mega recruit who rotated with upperclassmen Eric McCoo and Omar Easy until the Lions committed to him for his senior season. He then rushed for more than 2,000 yards. You don't just stumble onto 2,000 yards, folks.

It's happening again this year with freshman Austin Scott, one of the nation's best high school running backs last year. Scott is sharing time with senior Ricky Upton, and if junior Mike Gasparato weren't out with a hamstring injury, he'd be playing, too. Then there's sophomore quarterback Michael Robinson, who clearly is the team's best player, but he had to wait until junior Zach Mills sustained a knee injury two weeks ago before earning the starting job.

Mills had struggled since the second half of last season and had played horribly the first month of this season. In the last two games, Robinson has thrown for 557 yards and two touchdowns and rushed for 61 yards and a touchdown. Were it not for some inexcusable special teams blunders, his play could have resulted in a win against Wisconsin.

Now with games against Purdue, Iowa and Ohio State looming, Robinson and Scott are the keys to Penn State's avoiding an embarrassing five-game losing streak. And forcing JoePa to make an inevitable decision sooner than he'd like.

For complete college football coverage, including Fearless Predictions for every game, every week, check out www.foxsports.com, keyword: college football.