In the first couple of weeks of May, days that must have seemed like a life sentence ago, Bill O’Brien, Penn State’s new football coach, sat with a group of reporters in a New Jersey hotel reception room.
He was raving about Penn State, the people he had met, the players he was beginning to get to know and the facilities that are the backbone of a major college football player. His words left no doubt: Penn State is an easy sell.
Not any more, of course. Not after the NCAA, in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky child sex-abuse scandal, dropped the most severe penalties ever handed down on a program.
Now O’Brien has to find a new way to sell a program in which a player will line up each way drastically outnumbered by an opponent in terms of scholarship and therefore talent and with no chance of winning a title or playing in a bowl game.
He may have found a way — himself. Before he took the Penn State job, O’Brien, the Patriots’ former offensive coordinator, was most well known for a 30-second face-to-face blowup on the sidelines with New England QB Tom Brady. That brought him instant credibility.
“I think people were impressed with what we did in New England, not necessarily something that happened on the sidelines in the course of one game,’’ O’Brien said in May when asked about the showdown with Brady. “How we performed as a team, our success, that’s what the players I’ve spoken to at Penn State were impressed with.’’
O’Brien also is using the NCAA’s own rules to find a reward for the players who stay. O’Brien said yesterday at ESPN’s headquarters in Bristol, Conn., Penn State is looking to add a 13th game and play at Hawaii. It would not be a bowl game, but Hawaii is a better destination in December than Shreveport.
Penn State was fined $60 million, stripped of 10 scholarships per year over the next four years, banned from a bowl appearance for four years and former coach Joe Paterno was stripped of 111 wins.
Yesterday, many Penn State players spoke for the first time yesterday, pledging to stay together.
Running back Silas Redd, who is weighing his options, has been approached about transferring by some 50 schools. One outlet reported that members of the Illinois coaching staff had flown to Happy Valley.
Big Ten — Legends, leaders and leeches.
“This program was not built by one man and it’s sure as hell not going to get torn down by one man,’’ senior linebacker Michael Mauti said in a veiled reference to Sandusky. “This program was built on every alumni, every single player that came before us, built on their backs.”