Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/541265
2 0 1 5 P E N N S T A T E F O O T B A L L SHOW STOPPERS A ustin Johnson woke up to a notification on his cellphone one morning in May. The message read simply: "Zettel tackles tree." While Johnson was sleeping, his teammate and close friend Anthony Zettel had made national news by ap- pearing in an Instagram video. The video had immediately gone viral, lead- ing to the notification, which may have seemed perplexing at first but on further reflection wasn't entirely out of char- acter. "Zettel tackles a tree? That's something he would do," Johnson re- called. "But I didn't know how well it went." He would soon find out. Filmed in an unremarkable bit of weedy, mossy forest, the video shows Penn State's first-team All-Big Ten defensive tackle crouching into his terrifyingly familiar three-point stance. Zettel pauses briefly, then hurtles straight into a thick, dead-white, completely unsus- pecting tree. Displaying perfect form, he drives his feet continuously while making a tackling dummy of the tree, uprooting it com- pletely. Soon after it was posted, CNN, NFL.com and ESPN were aggre- gating the video, and Zettel was learning a lesson in how quickly the stupid exploits of a summer day can spread around the world. His subsequent explanation – "I saw the tree and felt like it needed to come down, so I just tackled it" – didn't go over well with head coach James Franklin. Nor was defensive line coach Sean Spencer, self-described developer of "wild dogs," particularly excited to see one of his best players throwing an unprotected shoulder into a tree trunk. But to Johnson, it was just another moment of goofy improvisation, of which he and his fellow defensive tackle have shared many over the past few years. "It was pretty funny," he said, "very funny, actually." It's a lot less funny when you're on the receiving end of that kind of hit, and opponents know that feeling all D E F E N S I V E L I N E M E N | Austin Johnson and Anthony Zettel clamp down on PSU's opponents