Blue White Illustrated

The true originator of Linebacker U O ne of the myths revived by the national media in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal is that the one- time defensive coordinator is the ar- chitect of the Penn State football team's reputation as Linebacker U. Actually, the creator – or father – of Linebacker U is Dan Radakovich. Like Sandusky, Radakovich is a for- mer Penn State player, but Sandusky was still in high school when Radakovich became the team's first official linebackers coach in 1960. And it was Radakovich who taught Sandusky how to coach linebackers before leaving the Nittany Lion staff in 1970. One cannot deny that Sandusky, now known worldwide as a convicted serial pedophile, coached many of Penn State's outstanding linebackers in his tenure as an assistant coach from 1969 to 1999. That's a fact that can't be erased by his heretofore se- cret evil acts while preying on inno- cent and susceptible children and young boys. There's also no doubt that what Sandusky did in his private life has tarnished the public perception of the Linebacker U nickname that has been synonymous with Penn State football for nearly 40 years. But the coach who started it all and the play- ers who made that proud nickname possible with their accomplishments on the field should not be held in any less esteem because of Sandusky's loathsome conduct. Now, this is not an attempt to di- minish Sandusky's role in enhancing Penn State's reputation as Line- backer U. My purpose is to set the record straight in the aftermath of a scandal that rocked the college foot- ball world and has damaged Penn State forever. I also have a personal stake in this because for the past four years I have been helping Dan Radakovich write his autobiography. The book, "Bad Rad: Football Nomad," is about to be published and it includes all the de- tails on how the nickname came about. You can read an excerpt from the book in this issue of BWI. Although I knew Dan as far back as 1956, when he was a senior starting linebacker for coach Rip Engle and I was a sophomore on the staff of The Daily Collegian, even I did not realize his significance to Linebacker U until after becoming the first director of the Penn State All-Sports Museum in 2001. After covering Penn State foot- ball for various media in the 1960s and getting to know Dan better as an assistant coach, I moved to the Mid- west. I knew he had been on the staff of the Pittsburgh Steelers in the 1970s when they won Super Bowls but I lost track of him in the 1980s. Ironically, it was at a Second Mile golf tournament sometime in the late 1990s or early 2000s where we met again. By then, he was the defensive coordinator at Robert Morris Universi- ty, a small college in suburban Pitts- burgh that had never had a football program until Radakovich and head coach Joe Walton, the onetime Pitt player and NFL coach, started it a few years earlier. We were a couple of old acquaintances who hadn't talked in decades but we resumed our friend- ship just like it was back in 1969. From that point on, I would see Dan just about every year at the Sec- ond Mile golf tournament, and while I was still running the All-Sports Mu- seum he would often bring some of his Robert Morris players to Beaver Stadium while they were touring the Penn State football facilities. Seeing and talking to Dan jogged my memories of the 1960s when I was covering Penn State football for various media. I had not realized he was the first linebackers coach but I had lived through those years writing about Bob Mitinger, Dave Robinson, Bill Saul and Ralph Baker, who were in the first wave of players that helped Penn State earn its now-fa- mous nickname. It became apparent to me that Dan was the foundation of Linebacker U and not Sandusky, but he had been all but forgotten in the glorification of Sandusky for three decades by the media and fans. Sandusky had even written a highly regarded book, "Developing Line- backers, The Penn State Way," in 1977 – just eight years after becom- ing the team's linebackers coach. I did not find out until helping Dan write his autobiography that San- dusky knew next to nothing about coaching linebackers until he spent three weeks of intense training with Radakovich. If you wonder how in- tense, just keep in mind that Dan's nickname is Bad Rad, and his un- compromising on- and off-field drills are legendary with all of his former collegiate and professional players. In fact, Radakovich wanted to be certain that Sandusky would not for- get what he was being taught, and so Dan compiled "a notebook as fat as a New York City phone book." As Radakovich writes in Chapter Ten of his autobiography: "This was to be (Jerry's) football Bible for his first couple of years as linebacker coach. Bob Phillips, the receiver coach at the time, said (Jerry) and Joe Paterno would get into a discussion or argu- ment about some aspect of football and (Jerry) would say, 'Rad's book doesn't say that.' " In the spring of 2005, when I was still the director of the museum, I was telling former Blue White Illus- trated editor Mark Brennan about Radakovich being the original line- backers coach. Brennan had just started his own publication, Fight On State, and he asked me to profile Radakovich. That article contained this quote from Radakovich, "I guess you might call me the father of 'Line-

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