Collier: Penn State football takes first, slow step out of swamp
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The first football coaching search at Penn State in nearly half a century seemed to last nearly half a century; but it was over in less than two miserable months.
There were times when it seemed like you'd soon hear that the Coast Guard had joined the search, or that the search would henceforth be aided by highly-trained coach-sniffing dogs. By Thursday of this week, the Penn State job was the last of 25 such positions at the major college level still not filled for 2012.
The low point in a process that had the external appearance of a full-blown bumblethon was when Tom Clements was reportedly interviewed on Skype.
Holy Skype, isn't that the way Joe Paterno managed his final recruiting visits? Was Clements, the former Steelers assistant and the quarterbacks coach of the Green Bay Packers, on the inside track to be the world's first Skype hire? Why not just turn the whole program into a video game? Don't think someone doesn't have Grand Theft Auto-State College in the works right now.
In the end, new coach Bill O'Brien got described as hard-nosed and old-school, probably because Penn State had easily taken long enough to sift through the entire soft-nosed, new-school population of these United States.
Throughout the process, Penn State proved still again that it could keep a secret, which is, with still another heapin' helpin' of down-home irony, exactly what got it into this unholy mess in the first place. Maybe dear old State was going to be conducting a coaching search this winter anyway. Maybe had he been allowed to coach in the 100 percent tradition-free Ticket City Bowl, Paterno would have called a press conference to say that after 62 years on the sideline, the last 46 as head coach, maybe someone who could still stand erect for three hours should run the show.
Nothing so quaint happened, not remotely.
All of this happened instead because in about 72 hours, former Paterno assistant Jerry Sandusky was to be arraigned on the lurid charges that he sexually abused 10 young boys over the past 15 years, and because every Penn State employee who ever got so much as a whiff of it abandoned those kids just as demonstrably as if they had left each of them on the shoulder of I-80 in a Centre County blizzard.
So maybe that's the reason the coaching search took so long, no?
Your typical college coaching search doesn't start with the question, "Who among the nation's great football minds and motivators of young college men would best be qualified to get plopped down into the middle of an open-ended child rape scandal?"
First Published January 6, 2012 6:40 pm
