Penn State Sports Magazine
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M A Y 2 0 2 2 6 1 W W W . B L U E W H I T E O N L I N E . C O M administration on all matters, from fa- cilities, to name, image and likeness con- siderations, to the pursuit of transfers in the age of immediate eligibility. "This athletic director hire is going to be critical for the university as a whole, for the athletic department, and then specifically for the football program," Franklin said. "It's very important that we build strong relationships so I can do a great job of building the football pro- gram in the vision that they expect it to be run." Paterno had exactly that sort of rela- tionship with his ADs. Of the five men who served as athletics director during his 46 years as head football coach, four had been internal hires. One was a for- mer PSU football letterman who went into athletics administration at his alma mater after serving in the Marines (Ed Czekaj). One was a close confidant of the coach (Tarman). One was a former Pa- terno player (Tim Curley). And one was Paterno himself. All four had been at the university for years before taking charge of the athletics department. Paterno had succeeded Czekaj. His ad- ministrative career is best remembered for the only head coach he hired —wom- en's basketball's Rene Portland — and for his efforts to create an all-sports confer- ence featuring Penn State and its fellow football independents. The proposed Eastern conference fiz- zled when Pitt and Syracuse joined the Big East in basketball. Paterno's tenure as AD didn't last much longer. The Nittany Lions had struggled in 1979, finishing 8-4 and settling for a spot in the Liberty Bowl after playing for the national championship the year before. Paterno believed it was partly due to his many off-the-field commitments. As he explained in his autobiography, "I talked to player after player trying to find out what went wrong and what we needed to do. I learned that if they came for counsel or support, they felt I wasn't there for them. Kid after kid told me, one way or another, that I always seemed too busy. … Many people were saying that I had too much power at Penn State, and now kids were saying I'd lost my influence with them." In March 1982, Paterno stepped down and was replaced by Tarman. A Gettysburg College graduate who had joined Penn State's athletics de- partment in 1958 as sports publicity director, Tarman had been part of Pa- terno's inner circle from the start. After Paterno took over the program, Tarman and radio play-by-play man Fran Fisher joined him on barnstorming tours around the state, looking to drum up interest in Penn State football. Even after moving into administration, Tar- man still co-hosted Paterno's weekly television show, "TV Quarterbacks," and served as an analyst on the Penn State Radio Network. Tarman's tenure as athletics director was enormously consequential. Penn State won two national championships in football, built Holuba Hall, expanded Beaver Stadium by more than 10,000 seats, and finally found a conference home as Paterno had wanted, joining the Big Ten in 1990. A DEVASTATING END When Tarman stepped down in 1993, the reins were handed to Curley. A State College native, Curley's Penn State roots ran as deep as anyone in the athletics department. When he was a kid, he parked cars and sold game pro- grams at Rec Hall and Beaver Stadium. He joined the football team in the early 1970s, graduating in 1976. The program's growth continued un- der Curley's leadership. There was an- other stadium expansion project and a couple of major fundraising drives. And while the on-field successes were more sporadic in the waning years of the Paterno era, there were big accomplish- ments elsewhere. Under Curley's direc- tion, Penn State built a hockey arena and a baseball stadium, and it made one of the greatest coaching hires in univer- sity history when it landed Cael Sander- son to take over the wrestling program. Of course, it's impossible to talk about Curley's tenure without delving into its devastating end. The Sandusky scandal swept out Curley, Paterno, university president Graham Spanier and others in November 2011, and it raised ques- tions about whether the synchronicity between Penn State's administration and its football program had been part of the problem. All those people saying that Paterno had too much power … had they been right all along? Louis Freeh seemed to think so. In his report into the university's handling of allegations against former defensive co- ordinator Jerry Sandusky, he contended that one of Penn State's weaknesses was "a culture of reverence for the football program that is ingrained at all levels of the campus community." A NEW SET OF ISSUES An ironic footnote to the Sandusky scandal is that, for all the criticism of Penn State's insularity, the two athlet- ics directors who followed Curley were former Paterno players, too. Mark Sher- burne had played football and baseball at Penn State before going into administra- tion. He served as interim AD for 10 days after Curley took a leave of absence. Dave Joyner, a former All-America offensive tackle, then took over the department on a temporary basis and ended up steering it through the fallout from the Freeh report and the imposi- tion of major NCAA sanctions. When Barbour took charge in July 2014 after a decade at Cal, it was the first time since Ernie McCoy was hired in 1952 that Penn State brought in an athletics direc- tor with no previous ties to the univer- sity. That was part of her appeal. She arrived at a moment when the university wanted a more conventional hierarchy, one in which the football coach didn't have an outsized influence on depart- ment policy. But it's been eight years now, and the crisis that served as the backdrop to Penn State's last AD search continues to recede ever deeper into the past. The most pressing issues in 2022 are altogether different: NIL, the transfer portal, facilities upgrades. That's what Barbour's successor will have to ad- dress, and no matter who that person turns out to be, no matter where they come from, you can be assured that he or she will be in alignment with James Franklin. ■