The Five: Men in White (2012)

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"A dag-gone miracle" (1984)

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I.

There’s a moment early in Chris Raymond’s new book, Men In White: The Gutsy, Against-All-Odds Return of Penn State Football, in which a former player named John Urschel recounts an early team meeting with school’s new coach, Bill O’Brien. This is in the heart of the summer of 2012, at a moment of reckoning for players like Urschel and for coaches like O’Brien and for the entire Penn State football program and for the university itself, as well as for a lot of people—like Chris, and like me—who had tethered our identities to that program in ways we had yet to fully contend with.

That day, the sanctions against the Penn State program had been passed down, and they were severe: A $60 million fine, a four-year postseason ban, four years of scholarship reductions, and perhaps most crucially for those players who remained, the ability to transfer schools immediately, without penalty.

And according to Urschel, Bill O’Brien stood before his team and told it to them straight: The fact that we can’t play for a national championship isn’t a big deal, he said, because we’re not a national championship team. And then O’Brien made the case that it didn’t really matter—that every week at Penn State, you would play in front of 110,000 people, and you would become a pillar of a community whose very fabric had been torn asunder. And these were the things that mattered, and these were the things you would remember above all else someday when you were older and reflecting on the choice you were about to make.

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II.

“In the four-team era, Penn State never once made the College Football Playoff. But it could also easily be argued that no team came closer to the playoff without actually making it.”

—Neil Paine

“We are one of the few programs in the country (where) you can win 10 or 11 games and people are unhappy.”

—Penn State football coach James Franklin, to The Athletic.

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III.

I have written far too many times about my emotional connection to Penn State and its football team, and so I won’t bore you with these things again. But I’m noticing something as this college football season approaches, and I guess it’s inevitable: The definition of success will now be filtered entirely through the lens of playoff success.

I suppose this is an unavoidable byproduct of college football’s newest gilded era; I suppose this is how it has long worked in pretty much every major American sport except college football. I suppose college football has been trending this way for a long time. I suppose even when I was kid, this was kind of the way it was, even if people were less willing to admit it, back when Penn State’s seemed to stand for some ideal where long-term success in life mattered more than short-term results on the field.

But I think the events of Raymond’s book—that line of demarcation in the history of a program that had seemed to rise above that zero-sum sense of striving, and appeared, at least on the surface, to stand for something bigger than football—led me to question what about that image was real and what wasn’t. It led me to question what it really meant to care about this sport in the first place, and what it meant to care about any sports at all.

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IV.

Chris Raymond, like me, is a lifelong Penn State football fan—and also a friend of mine—but I would like to think the themes of his book apply to whichever allegiances you happen to have carried over since childhood, in whichever sport meant the most to you. Sure, there are those who get hooked on the cycle of sports-talk radio and social media, who make themselves miserable with contortionist hot-takes and irrational complaints about losing. But eventually, as the years pass by, most of us start to ask ourselves, How much do the results really matter?

Here was a college football team that, due to circumstances beyond their control, had very little to play for. As the team’s strength coach told Raymond, “the things they had to look forward had been stripped away.” And yet a core of players chose to remain at Penn State. And they did it for some ineffable reason that could not easily be expressed; maybe because they had gained some kind of pride in themselves, and in their teammates, and in their coaches, and in their university. Maybe because they felt like it was the right thing to do. And even if you don’t believe that—even if you believe, as some did, that Penn State would have been better off dismantling its football program altogether—ask yourself, Why did I feel that way?

I’m guessing it’s because you thought college sports were completely out of control, that they’d been overcome by a sense of greed and self-preservation and victory at all costs. And I’m guessing you would think that these players’ decision to stay behind when everything they had to look forward to was stripped away serves as a kind of rebuke to the things that probably made you think that in the first place. It is a story patterned on the connective tissue that’s defined every great sports movie in history, from The Bad News Bears to A League of Their Own to Rocky to Friday Night Lights.

“The guys that stayed behind,” said one player on that team, Stephon Morris, “we have a brotherhood stronger than any other in the history of college football.”

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V.

A dozen years later, I find that this sense of perspective still lingers. I mean, don’t get me wrong: I lose my shit and frighten my dog and make my partner flee the room when I watch a Penn State football game, because I carry all of that residual emotion from childhood. But at the same time, the adult version of me knows that the result doesn’t really matter, and that there are ultimately more important things at work here, and that this is what’s always set college football apart from most other sports. And I hope it does not get lost in this fraught new era, when everyone is chasing playoff glory, and when no one seems particularly happy about what this sport has become.

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