Blue White Illustrated

FANTASTIC FOUR Thirty years ago, the Nittany Lions welcomed a quartet of young linemen to campus as part of their 1991 recruiting class. Those players would go on to spearhead one of the greatest offensive performances in college football history | electing the best offensive line class ever recruited by Penn State is relatively easy. The year was 1991. Three years later, four of those play- ers were starters on the undefeated 1994 team that was one of the greatest offen- sive machines in college football history. Two years after that historic season, all four were NFL Draft choices: guard Jeff Hartings and tackle Andre Johnson in the first round, and tackle Keith Conlin and guard Marco Rivera in the sixth. When they were recruited, no one on the Penn State staff or any of the few pro- fessional recruiting gurus of the time could have predicted what was ahead for the four players. John Bove was in his sixth and last year as coach Joe Paterno's recruiting coordinator, and he has vivid memories of how it happened. "Our whole staff would sit around and go over the depth chart and say we need this many linemen and we need a tight end," said Bove, now retired after more than three decades at Penn State and liv- ing in his hometown of Wilmington, Del. "You always had to offer more players than you needed. If we needed 25 players, we'd offer 50. We would always get 50 percent of the players we offered. We were lucky, because that was our success rate as long as I was there. You had to be careful, because if you over-offered you would get too many accepting and then you would have to talk someone out of a scholarship. They resolved that later with what they called 'grayshirting' by having a couple recruits wait until the following January to enroll." Dick Anderson coached Penn State's offensive line for many of his 35 years on the staff. "It's extremely difficult for a freshman to come in and play," Anderson said. "It's tough for any freshman any- where to play regardless of their talent. Some do, and some have to play out of need, injuries or maybe a depth problem. It becomes even more difficult for an of- fensive lineman, which may be the most difficult position to handle mentally. Then you have the transfer of physical abilities into that position. Even though they may have some physical potential beyond the guys that are playing, it's gen- erally realistic not to play them." Anderson said Hartings was a superior talent but definitely needed the time to develop into the All-American he be- came. "Jeff Hartings was really an un- dersized lineman when he came to us," Anderson said, " but he had all the at- tributes of being a good player. It was a matter of him trying to fill out and get bigger so that he could compete at a very high level. He did that gradually from freshman to senior and kept getting stronger." As media guides indicated, Hartings was a 6-foot-3, 242-pound redshirt freshman, and his weight increased each year: 270 in '93, 275 in '94 and 284 in '95. Bove doesn't recall precisely how many S >>

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