Among Penn State football players, Jerry Sandusky had been an "old guy who worked out here once in a while," and under coach Joe Paterno they "were protecting an image," team members say in an upcoming book by author John U. Bacon.
Penn State is one of four Big Ten programs examined in
Fourth and Long: The Fight for the Soul of College Football, an exclusive excerpt of which was published in
The Wall Street Journal.
The Penn State portion of the book includes reaction of the 2012 Penn State team to the unprecedented sanctions levied against the school and program in the wake of the Sandusky child sex abuse scandal. ....
The excerpt also includes a passage that examines Paterno's relationship to his team in the latter stages of his career:
Sometime after Penn State's undefeated 1994 season, Paterno's passion for coaching began to wane. In 2006, after a Wisconsin player ran into him on the sidelines and injured his leg just below the knee, he hardly coached at all, watching games from the press box without a headset. After he recovered, he returned to the sidelines, but he still didn't wear a headset or carry a clipboard, and he rarely attended team meetings. Privately, the staff joked that the less the 84-year-old Paterno got involved, the better things usually went. When Paterno did weigh in, he often confused the situation, got players' names wrong or just yelled at them by their numbers.
Still, his assistants clung to certain symbols of the Paterno Way. "Shave your face, cut your hair," Mauti said, recalling the mantra. "If we weren't shaved for a practice,
we would have to work out on Saturdays in the off-season. It got almost to the point where that's all that mattered."
