Classical Coaching

Insight on the News, Sept 17, 2001 by Rex Roberts

College football stretches its boundaries ... or is history just repeating itself?

Sometime this fall, 74-year-old Joe Paterno will reach a major milestone in his career, needing but two victories to pass legendary Paul "Bear" Bryant to become the winningest college football coach (winningest in Division I-A, that is; Eddie Robinson of Grambling State, a Division I-AA school, is the runaway leader, his 408 wins towering over Bryant's 323). Alas, the much-anticipated event will be anticlimactic.

For one thing, Paterno was expected to overtake the famed Alabama coach last year, but Penn State ended the season with just five wins -- only the second time in his 35-year tenure as head coach that he suffered a losing season. For another thing, the 2001 Nittany, Lions are an unproven team facing a grinding schedule, playing seven bowl teams in the first eight weeks, beginning with Miami, which many consider the best team in the country.

But if anyone can turn adversity into advantage, it's JoePa. "Like other great coaches, Joe has had the extraordinary ability to analyze opponents and figure out ways to beat them," writes Michael O'Brien in No Ordinary Joe (Rutledge Hill Press, $14.95 paperback, 366 pp). "The more time he has had to prepare a game plan, the more likely he has been to defeat any opponent." In this way, and many others, Paterno resembles another renowned college coach -- Amos Alonzo Stagg, who accrued 314 victories during an extraordinary career at the University of Chicago. "Stagg was the most prolific creator of game strategies and play tactics during the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first twenty-five years of the twentieth" writes Robin Lester in Stagg's University (University of Illinois Press, $18.95 paperback, 325 pp).

Paterno's life would parallel Stagg's. Both were descendants of immigrants who had settled in or near New York City -- Paterno grew up in a middleclass family in Brooklyn, Stagg in a working-class family in West Orange, N.J. Both were excellent students who gained entree to Ivy League schools on the basis of their athletic abilities -- Paterno played basketball and football at Brown, Stagg baseball and football at Yale (where he was named to the first All-American team in 1889).

Both young men were intellectually curious and considered the ministry, but they embraced coaching almost immediately upon leaving college. Stagg joined Chicago in 1891, at the founding of the school, and was forced to retire in 1933 at age 70 (he went on to coach at the College of the Pacific and other schools for another two decades). Paterno joined Penn State as an assistant coach in 1950 and took over as head coach in 1966. Both would lead five teams to undefeated seasons, becoming national icons in the process.

"Stagg and football became the measure of the institution for many Americans and for a remarkably large proportion of students, scholars, and administrators" writes Lester about the Maroons and their coach, who grew more famous than the myriad Nobel laureates among the school's faculty and alumni. "Stagg even led the chosen few toward the final coaching stage -- the celebrity-entrepreneurs of twentieth-century universities. These powerful coaches often occupied a cultural and financial niche well above their college president or state governor."

Certainly Paterno fits that description. Like Stagg, however, Paterno embodies the purer aspects of the sport -- recruiting fairly, winning gracefully and graduating his players timely. His philosophy, which he labeled "the Grand Experiment" emphasized education first and athletics second.

As Paterno himself put it, he sought "to re-create at this more-or-less ordinary state university, for these kids of more-or-less ordinary farm and working-class family backgrounds, something like the excitement that made most days at Brown University wonderful for me -- the books, the bull sessions, the sense of wonder and anticipation, all that and football, too." Similarly, he urged faculties and administrations to regain control of the game from boosters and profiteers who overemphasized football at the expense of university life.

"Penn State held up to student-athletes the idea of the ancient Greeks and the salient qualities this ideal encompassed," writes O'Brien, who emphasizes Paterno's early training under the Jesuits at Brooklyn Prep, where he read the Aeneid in Latin. Paterno himself cites Virgil as one of the most important influences on his thinking: "The best man, the best team, isn't automatically entitled to win" he wrote in his autobiography, Paterno: By the Book, published in 1989. "The winds of fate can turn you around, run you aground, sink you, and sometimes you can't do a thing about it. You can commit yourself to accomplishing a goal, doing something good, winning a game. Just to make that commitment to something you believe in is winning -- even if you lose the game."

Paterno's "Grand Experiment" works: 78 percent of Penn State student-athletes graduate, a rate that is 20 percent higher than those at peer institutions, according to the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Football players graduate at a rate of 76 percent, compared with 48 percent (on average) at other Division I-A schools.