It’s important to state this now, before Bill O’Brien suffers his first loss or posts his first win as Penn State’s first new head football coach in 46 years: O’Brien was the right man to step into one of the most daunting coaching jobs in the history of college football.
It’s important to state this now, before we see if O’Brien can be the same offensive wunderkind in college as he was as an assistant with the Patriots.
O’Brien has the intelligence and the temerity to guide this Penn State football community — and it is a community — reconnect and recommit.
It’s important to state now that O’Brien has the toughness to stand tall in State College just as he once stood tall in front of Tom Brady and exchanged spittle during a sideline dustup.
It’s important to state it now because O’Brien’s task goes beyond winning football games, although at the end of the day he must win a lot more than he loses. Penn State football is big business.
But right now, Penn State’s second head coach in 47 years has more pressing issues than what to call on second-and-11 from his 20.
“I do know this, that this is a place that I’m very proud to be the head football coach here,’’ O’Brien said Saturday after coaching Penn State’s Blue-White game. “I also know that the football program is a part of the athletic department which I believe is a great athletic department which is a part of a special university.
“And that’s all we are. We’re a big part obviously, there’s a 108,000-seat stadium that we’re sitting in right now. But we’re a part of a great athletic program that’s part of a great university.’’
It is a university that has been torn apart and there might be more damage before the healing. Yes, the late Joe Paterno was fired in the wake of the horrific child sex abuse allegations leveled at his onetime defensive coordinator, Jerry Sandusky. But we still do not know the severity and extent of the harm Sandusky inflicted.
One has to know Penn State to understand the horror and disbelief these allegations have caused. If Norman Rockwell were to have drawn his ideal of a college campus, it would look like Penn State.
Paterno died about two months after he was fired and the belief here is that the cause of death was a broken heart and a seared soul. Penn State took away what he loved most after his family, and that killed him.
Paterno was more than a coach. He was an educator and a family man. He left Brooklyn Prep for Brown and when his dad learned he wanted to coach football instead of practice law, it did not sit well.
O’Brien is not Paterno and no one should make him out to be. But it is fascinating that he, too, went to Brown and when his mentor learned of his passion to coach it also did not sit well.
“I said, ‘Are you an idiot?’” Jim Bernhardt, O’Brien’s linebacker coach at Brown and now a special assistant to his former student at Penn State, told The Post. “You have an Ivy League education and you want to coach? But Bill always had a great understanding of who he is and what he wants to achieve.’’
He has worked with and for some of the great coaches in football, from the ornery George O’Leary at Georgia Tech to the meticulous Bill Belichick with the Patriots.
Of course, this will not be easy. He must show himself to be a man of values, like Paterno, but he must be his own man. He must install his system, recruit players to fit his vision, yet not alienate his current players. And he must do it in a conference in which coaches such as Bret Bielema and Brady Hole have the jump on him.
“I’ve learned so many, many things I wouldn’t be able to pick out one thing,’’ he said. “I’ve had so many people, whether they’re Penn Staters or State College people or people in the new neighborhood that I live in that just talk about a special place this is and what the university means to the community, the state, the country.’’
It means more than can be stated. O’Brien wasn’t the flavor of the month, but Penn State didn’t need that. It needed a man of substance. And that’s what it got.