Blue White Illustrated

KEEPING IT REAL O'Brien wanted to make his quarterback evaluations as quickly as possible. "There's no room for gray area," he said. "We don't have time for it." Steve Manuel He toned it down for the Beaver Stadium masses, if a crowd of 28,000 can be described as a mass. He handed out a few atta-boys to his players and tried to engage with fans as they shivered through an unseasonably cold and windy afternoon. "Let's get the wave going!" he barked at one point, to no apparent effect. The crowd – what was left of it after the halftime break, anyway – continued to sit on its hands. That was about as confrontational as things got. Of course, this was the spring game, so the stakes were low. If Penn State were to reprise its mike-thecoach stunt during the regular sea- son, it would either make Nittany Lion football the most entertaining spectacle in college sports or bring about the end of O'Brien's coaching career. Possibly both. There are limits, after all, to just how much honesty is productive or desirable. No one in O'Brien's position is going to be full-disclosure all the time, and the Nittany Lions' second-year coach demonstrated as much at a Coaches Caravan stop in Reading when, asked to elaborate on Zach Zwinak's recent hand injury, he described it as "not life-threatening." With the season now less than four months away, the only thing we know about Zwinak's hand is that it's still attached. Probably. O'Brien chose his words with equal care this spring whenever he talked about the battle for the starting quarterback job between Tyler Ferguson and Steven Bench. He emphasized the fact that the staff was taking a good long look at both of them in practice, at one point noting that they had gotten exactly 168 snaps apiece. But evidently he was a lot more frank with the two quarterbacks in private conversation. When O'Brien called Bench into his office, he told the sophomore that he was not going to have a chance to compete for the starting job, that it was a two-man competition and that he had lost his spot to Christian Hackenberg, a player who isn't even on campus yet. To borrow a phrase from Penn State men's volleyball coach Mark Pavlik, O'Brien hit Bench with a two-by-four of competitive reality. Shortly after the meeting, Bench revealed that he was transferring. O'Brien said a few days later that he wished the young quarterback had chosen to stay, describing him as "a really good teammate, a good kid." It was the right thing to say, but one look at the numbers, and you come away thinking that Bench's transfer was probably the best outcome for all concerned. With 20 fewer scholarship athletes on their roster than their opponents, the Nittany Lions need to maximize the potential of every single one of those grants. If O'Brien truly believed Bench was unable to play at a level that Penn State's offense required, then it was better for both player and school that they part ways. With the transfer, Bench will be able to find a school where he will receive a chance to compete right away, and the coaching staff will be able to take its time figuring out how best to use that scholarship, a luxury it didn't have when it arrived in January 2012 and immediately found itself scrambling to line up commitments. Does that sound cold? Maybe it does. Maybe the Nittany Lions played hardball with a kid who took a chance on them when they were down. But two thoughts occur. The first is that Bench probably got a better deal than Rob Bolden, who was told by the previous coaching staff that he could play at this level and had his transfer request denied in 2011, even though there was ample evidence at the time that Matt McGloin was the team's best quarterback. The second thought is that this is simply the way business is done at elite college football schools, and if Penn State wants to compete against the likes of Ohio State and Michigan, it will have to do what it can within the rules to put its best team on the field. It can't afford to hold back the hotshot kids in favor of the plucky overachievers. It can't afford to lock the freshmen away somewhere where they can't be seen or heard. Joe Paterno's assistants used to say they'd rather play a kid one game too late than one game too soon. Can't do that anymore, either. In order to meet the NCAA's 65player cap, which goes into effect next year, Penn State had to trim its roster down to roughly 65 scholarship players this year. So unless the NCAA knocks a year off of the back end – and does anybody really think it will do that? – the team will be under the scholarship cap for five years rather than the four that the NCAA mandated. And even in 2018, when the cap is lifted, Penn State probably won't have a full 85-man scholarship roster. What does that mean? It

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