Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/83706
the backs of their jerseys for the first time, former Nittany Lion tight end Troy Drayton called it "blasphemy" and vowed that he wouldn't watch any of the team's games this season. Melo- dramatic? Maybe, but Penn State has been going through a lot of upheaval in the past year, and the university's traditions are part of its institutional identity – an identity that lately has come to seem as if it's under assault. "What's happened here," Penn State sports historian Lou Prato said, "is that we're under scrutiny from the guilt-by-association people in the gen- eral public. Once, Penn State could walk out on the field and it stood for purity and everything that was good about college football. Now we are seen as the villains of college football, and perception is reality. [Bill] O'Brien and some others are walking on eggshells. He's changed some of the traditions for cultural reasons and others [to sig- nify] that Penn State is different from now on. And it is." Some saw the nameless jerseys as emblematic not just of Penn State but of Joe Paterno. The uniforms, coupled with Paterno's strict personal grooming policies, reflected an emphasis on team identity and a distaste for showy ex- pressions of individuality. When O'Brien announced he was changing the uni- forms, it seemed to some like a repu- diation of an old-fashioned worldview that fans, alumni and players had long embraced. As Drayton told the York Daily Record, "I just think there are certain things you don't touch, and that's one of them. That's a part of Penn State history. Changing it changes everything for me. Maybe I'm a purist." But O'Brien emphasized that the team would still come first, even though players would be receiving a bit more on-field recognition and would be free to take their personal grooming inspi- ration from whatever source they saw fit, be it GQ or the WWE. "I have respect for all the traditions that have gone on before I came here, and so what I decided to do was not to put my own stamp on the program, but to just put our own philosophy as a staff into place," he said. "When we decided to put the names on the back of the jerseys, I felt it was important for the people out there to really know who these kids were who stuck with this program, who stuck with this uni- versity, who are going to help this community move forward. I felt it was important for the people to know who these kids were and what their names were, because when you put the helmet on, you can't really tell sometimes. "At the end of the day, though, what we've talked about to our team since day one is that we play as one team. We play off of each other. Offense gains momentum, defense has to stop the offense and vice versa. Defense gets a turnover, offense has to turn that into points. We play as one team. "It has nothing to do with individuals. It's more about people on the outside just knowing what these kids are all about moving forward and that these kids are high-character guys who really care about Penn State. That's why I decided to put the names on the back of the jerseys." Though controversial in some sections of Beaver Stadium, O'Brien's decision does have support, even from longtime fans. Said Prato, "I actually enjoyed seeing the names on the jerseys. I didn't need to look at the frickin' pro- gram to see who was making the play." There have been other changes – some symbolic, others logistical. The Paterno statue is gone, its pavilion having been bulldozed and replaced by a grassy embankment and a row of trees. Paternoville, the student en- campment that for years has been a fixture outside Beaver Stadium during game weeks, is now known as Nit- tanyville. And the team's pregame rou- tine is different, too, with players dress- ing at the stadium rather than at the Lasch Building. O'Brien has looked a little bit per- plexed at times by the preoccupation with off-the-field minutia. Before the team's opener against Ohio, he em- phasized that Penn State would be fol- lowing the same route to the stadium as before. He described how the buses would get to the stadium and joked that he would probably get some flak for not knowing the names of the streets. In years past, players would be in uniform as they got off the buses, and fans would crowd around to cheer them on as they entered the tunnel. For the opener against the Bobcats, the team arrived at 9:20 a.m. – nearly three hours before kickoff – and while the bus route was still lined with thou- sands of faithful fans, many others were sitting in traffic as the team ap- proached. Little things like that matter to a lot of fans, and O'Brien has tried to reach out to them. "I'm not trying to say that that's not a big deal," he said. "I'm just trying to say that what is a big deal is how we play when the ball is kicked off." The Ohio game wasn't a great day for the program's more militant tradi- tionalists. There were the uniforms, of course, and while O'Brien had said in the spring that he was looking to start a new tradition by having the team sing the Alma Mater to the crowd after every home game, that didn't happen. Following the Lions' 24-14 loss, players hustled off the field quietly. "I messed that up," O'Brien said a few days later. "It was completely my fault." Penn State certainly isn't the only school that takes its traditions seri- ously. Every school has something to rally around, to get fans excited and bind each new generation of alumni to those that preceded it. Are Penn Staters any more attached to "Sweet Caroline" or "Kernkraft 400" than Wis- consinites are to "Jump Around"? Do fans in Beaver Stadium cheer more loudly for the drum major's flip than fans at Ohio State do for the dotting of the "i"? Is the Nittany Lion more beloved than Uga or Bevo or Sparty? Probably not. But many of those other traditions have proven more malleable than Penn State's, more susceptible to the passage of time. Uga may be a fixture on Geor- gia's sideline, but there've been nine Ugas over the years and four backup mascots who have been forced to fill in at times for ailing Ugas, a list that includes Bugga Lou, Argos, Otto, Mag- illicuddy I and Russ. At Texas, 14 steers have served as Bevo over the years, and some say that the tradition hasn't been the same since Bevo V got