It Will Change You If You Let It

By Chris Buchignani

“When he first came here, he thought, ‘Oh my heavens… woods, hills. Don’t they ever stop?’ But he grew to love (Mount Nittany), and he loved just looking at it during practice, during games he’d glance over, and Mount Nittany was there… to Joe, it was a symbol of Penn State.”

That’s Sue Paterno, interviewed for the Mount Nittany Conservancy, summing up Joe’s journey from cynical Brooklynite offended by the odor of manure and unsettled by the Pennsylvania wilderness to founding member of an organization whose mission is to protect and preserve the Mountain for all to appreciate.

Most long-time Penn Staters know the stories of JoePa’s initial resistance to the role of assistant coach at a rural PA cow college and how the place nevertheless slowly sunk its claws into him. Somewhere along the way, the Nittany Valley changed from a pit stop ahead of law school to a forever home where he’d raise his family, make his name, and (more than once) turn down princely sums from NFL teams to remain here in pursuit of his life’s calling. It’s a remarkable story, one whose like we shall not see again, and yet within it are the seeds of an enduring lesson about the indispensable connection between a people and their place.

As we now turn the page on the James Franklin era, we ought to consider how it reached this unfortunate conclusion, including through the lens our past. No one is saying the next – or any – Penn State football coach should be another Joe Paterno. It’s an impossible standard, both because the man was one of one, a generational figure whose accomplishments would be less special if they were easily replicated, and also because the only version of him that now remains is the idealized one we hold in our memories. Nevertheless, his turn from reluctant transient to lifelong advocate for Penn State and State College reminds us of the futility of swimming against the tide.

George Atherton became president of Penn State at a time when the school teetered on the brink of failure. Against the odds, this Yale man with the heart of a Nittany Lion led a revival that laid the foundation for our modern University. When he died in office as Penn State’s longest-tenured president and among its most consequential, he was thusly eulogized: “He came to this bunch of houses with as much pride as if he were assuming the presidency of Cambridge or of his alma mater, Yale, because he saw from the first not the college that was, but the college that was to be.”

Atherton embodied those same feelings that stirred Joe and all who truly care for this lovely, intriguing spot to linger here, inspired to make a lasting difference, and it drove him to salvage the experiment in higher education called Penn State. 

Love for place matters.

Marcus Freeman, a military kid born on an Ohio Air Force base who played college ball for his home-state Buckeyes, has found a home in South Bend, Indiana, restoring the luster to Notre Dame football. Since I first heard it, I’ve been fascinated by the story of his conversion to Catholicism after ascending to the head coach position at a school where religious tradition famously runs deep. In a business overrun with egomania, here is a man experiencing success by recognizing what was there to be found for anyone willing to look.

Freeman, who famously outmaneuvered Franklin in a joint press conference before last season’s Orange Bowl then outcoached him in the game, has made his mantra in South Bend, “This place will change you if you let it.”  The man lives his message. Say what you like about the extent to which the modern University of Notre Dame is a “Catholic school” in the traditional sense, the faith and the culture around it are as inextricable from its unique identity as Touchdown Jesus and the Golden Dome. I struggle to believe there is no connection between a leader so willing to embody the essence of the place and one who seems to have finally awoken the echoes of its storied football program. But it’s not always about planting deep roots, as much as being where your feet are with an open mind and heart.

In fact, in his own way Joe’s successor, Bill O’Brien, as concrete and surly a character as you’ll find, a man who would never contemplate, much less utter aloud, any reference to “the magic of the Nittany Valley,” still clearly sensed and embodied the spirit of the place more strongly in two short years than James Franklin managed over his entire tenure. When an existential crisis threatened to implode everything Paterno had built and potentially the whole town and college with it, the newly-arrived O’Brien, who contractually-speaking could have beaten out all of his players in a stampede for the exits, instead buckled down and orchestrated a comeback in the face of adversity that will live in the annals of American sport. The man met the moment, in part because Penn State already meant more to him than just a job. We’ll never know of course, but my strong sense of it is that had similar turmoil engulfed the program during Franklin’s tenure, the Lasch Building would have emptied out faster than Beaver Stadium after the Northwestern game. 

“This place will change you if you let it.”

Happy Valley is old beyond reckoning, and I believe it is possessed of a special spirit, one that has drawn and held people who came to love it with all their might since long before Penn State, or certainly Penn State football, was even a thought. Over time, its people have come to embrace Mount Nittany as symbolic for its timeless quality, standing sentinel in its natural state, just as it has for eons. Gazing up at its gentle, distinctive slope, as Joe would from the football practice fields, can remind us that we are all just passing through, briefly inheriting a tradition much grander than ourselves, afforded an opportunity to leave it better than we found it. For all of the very good James brought here with him when he arrived and then wrought for Penn State in his more than decade-long stay, perhaps his fatal flaw was that he never found it within himself to recognize that spirit and humble himself before it, as so many have before, including several of his predecessors.

Whatever his insecurities, Franklin never seemed to doubt that Penn State was lucky to have him – offering us increasingly frequent reminders to that effect in recent years – less obvious is whether he ever managed to recognize that the reverse was also true. My sense is that James now departs Happy Valley and Penn State mired in a mutual bitterness and resentment, never having allowed it to change him, as his colleague Marcus Freeman might advise, never having known what it was to gaze up at the Mountain during a practice and feel the same tug that inspired Paterno, Atherton, O’Brien, and countless others.

Despite all he has given to Penn State, James Franklin never accepted in return the greatest gift it had to offer, and now he likely never will.

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Chris Buchignani is cohost of The Obligatory PSU Podcast and The Obligatory PSU Pregame Show, entering its 10^th season this Fall. He teaches a course on Penn State Football History for Penn State OLLI.