Blue White Illustrated

Criticism of hiring practices illustrates Freeh report's flaws A s readers of this column know, I have little respect for the Freeh report, which is being used by the NCAA to support its unprecedented sanctions against the Penn State football team. It is being generous to use the term "deeply flawed" in describing what Louis Freeh and his committee produced after its so-called "independent" investigation. Of the 120 recommendations in the report, however, there is one particular and obscure recommendation buried deep in the 500-page document that is ludicrous. One has to wonder how Freeh even included it. This concerns the hiring of the head coaches for Penn State's 31 athletic teams. Freeh Recommendation 5.3 on page 139 states: "Conduct national searches for key positions, including head coaches and Associate Athletic Director(s) and above." This recommendation supposedly came about because other parts of the Freeh report claimed the "Penn State Culture" allowed the athletic department to "live by their own rules," defying university policy and procedures. Yet, once again, nowhere in the Freeh report is there a shred of evidence that Penn State has not been conducting national searches for head coaches or associate athletic directors. Former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell, the independent monitor hired by the NCAA to ensure that Penn State complies with the recommendations of the Freeh report, stated in his first progress report, released Nov. 30, that this recommendation is only one of 12 that the athletic department has not yet begun. The obvious reason is that the recommendation is fraudulent. National searches for Penn State's head coaches have intensified for at least seven years – long before the arrest of Jerry Sandusky and the ensuing investigation by Freeh. In fact, of the 24 current head coaches, only five had direct Penn State connections prior to their hiring, and they have served the university well. Three are Penn State graduates who are longtime coaches of successful Nittany Lion Olympic sports teams: Char Morett (1979), field hockey since 1987; Mark Pavlik (1982), men's volleyball since 1995; and Randy Jepson (1982), an assistant in men's gymnastics for six years before becoming head coach in 1991. The only other head coach who is a Penn State grad is women's golf coach Denise St. Pierre (1983). She was an assistant for four years before being promoted in 2001. The fifth coach, John Hargis, graduated from Auburn in 1999 but was an assistant coach for men's and women's swimming from 2003 to '06. He returned to Penn State as head coach in 2008. Morett's field hockey teams have been in the NCAA tournament 23 of her 26 years, losing the championship game in 2002 and reaching the quarterfinals this most recent season after winning the Big Ten regular-season and tournament titles. Since Pavlik became the men's volleyball head coach, his teams have perennially been in the NCAA Final Four. His 2008 team won the national title, and when the Nittany Lions won it in 1994, Pavlik was just finishing his five-year stint as an assistant under Tom Peterson. Jepson has continued to build upon Hall of Fame coach Gene Wettstone's legacy by winning NCAA titles in 2000, 2004 and 2007. He has now stretched Penn State's record-setting number of championships to 12. Ten years earlier, if Freeh had recommended that Penn State was too insular in its hiring of head coaches, he might have had a point. In the 2002-03 academic year, there were seven more head coaches with previous ties to Penn State (a total of 12 in 29 sports), and four of them were graduates. Since then, national searches have led directly to the hiring of head coaches without previous Penn State connections in men's and women's basketball, men's and women's soccer, men's and women's lacrosse, baseball, wrestling, women's gymnastics and the newest varsity sports – men's and women's ice hockey. This list does not include Bill O'Brien, the head football coach, who was hired in January following Sandusky's arrest and the firing of Joe Paterno. The success that these coaches have achieved since their hiring is a matter of record, and it's all positive. Given time, some or all of them may become as accomplished as the Penn State graduates like Morett, Pavlik and Jepson, or the non-Penn Staters like women's volleyball coach Russ Rose and men's and women's fencing coach Emmanuil Kaidanov, both of whom have won multiple NCAA championships. Certainly, even after just three years, wrestling's Cael Sanderson already fits into that category with his back-to-back NCAA championships, unprecedented by an East Coast team. Now, let's look at the associate athletic directors. In 2002-03, there were three, not counting the one in charge of fundraising who reported to Old Main and athletics. All had previous ties to Penn State before being named to the position.

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