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great to have a friend right by you going through the same stuff." Penn State head coach Bill O'Brien said he was confident Mauti would get an opportunity to prove himself at the NFL level. He said that a few days after the draft concluded, he received an email from Leslie Frazier in which the Vikings coach expressed optimism about what Mauti and Hodges will bring to the team. "I didn't have any doubt that someone would take a chance," O'Brien said. "In fact, I thought maybe he would be drafted a little bit higher. Obviously, the knee injuries probably dropped him a little bit in the draft, but he's with a great organization. I just got an email today… just saying how happy they were to have both of those guys, Gerald and Michael, in that organization." Mauti is continuing his rehabilitation regimen, and while he said he's making better progress than he did after his first two knee injuries at Penn State, he isn't expecting to see the field for the Vikings in the immediate future. If all goes well, he thinks he may be able to return to action at some point during preseason camp in August. As was the case during the draft, he's having to be patient. But he's motivated by the fact that a team was willing to use a draft pick to bring him in. "That definitely shows their confidence in me medically and physically," he said. "I know a lot of people have questions about it, but they feel confident in their ability to rehab. Obviously they did that with Adrian Peterson and a couple of their other guys, so Minnesota has already tipped their sword for ACL rehab. They know what they're doing. "Once I get healthy, I think they got kind of a bargain, which is going to be good. They're going to get my worth out of me. It's going to be a great relationship, so I'm just looking forward to it." H I S T O R Y ON A WING AND A PRAYER A shift in strategy heralded Penn State's first big quarterback debate | oe Paterno had not even seen the Penn State campus when the football team's first quarterback controversy began, but he was soon in the thick of it. The day was May 1, 1950. Ten days earlier, Penn State had introduced Rip Engle as the new head coach, and on this warm Wednesday afternoon, the team was starting an extra two weeks of spring practice. The players already had spent four weeks practicing, and after a scrimmage against Duquesne at Beaver Field on Saturday, April 22, they all thought they were done until preseason drills in August. Engle had watched that scrimmage after being officially named head coach in the morning, and he knew he had a major problem. For decades, Penn State utilized the traditional single-wing offense. Engle was the mastermind of the wing-T, an offshoot of the T-formation that evolved in the 1930s and 1940s and was now more popular in all levels of football than the single-wing. The offenses were radically different in style and in the responsibilities and especially the player assignments in the backfield. In the run-oriented single-wing, the quarterback called the J plays but he was the designated blocking back, like a fullback in the T-formation. The tailback and fullback were the prime runners and/or passers and the players who normally took the snap from center several yards deep in the backfield. With the T-formation, the quarterback moved under center to direct the offense and became the foremost ball-handler and passer in an attack that stressed more wide-open passing and faking. Engle took the basic T one step further by placing one of the running backs just behind the line outside of the end. His wing-T had made Brown the talk of the Ivy League. The Bears went 7-2 in 1948 and 8-1 the following year, leading to his hiring by Penn State. The Nittany Lions' single-wing had been good enough in 1947 to produce one of the outstanding teams in the country. They won nine games that season, tying SMU in the 1948 Cotton Bowl and finishing No. 4 in the Associated Press poll. The 1948 team was headed for a return to the Cotton Bowl until it was upset by Pitt, 7-0, in late November, but it still finished 7-1-1. Coach Bob Higgins retired after the '48 season, and his assistant Joe Bedenk took over for one year, posting a

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