Cruising on Paterno's Staying Power; No. 4 Penn State Builds Fast-Paced Success on Old Stability
It's one of the trade-offs of college football. If you want a glamorous job, you probably won't live in a glamorous city. South Bend, Ind., Tuscaloosa, Ala., Lincoln, Neb., are dream locations only if you're a coach.</br></br>This is one of those places. By car, you have to drive two hours just to be two hours away from somewhere. Air travel here isn't for the faint of heart, since the airport can barely accommodate anything larger than a Cessna. If your car radio can only commit four FM stations to memory, you could live here and have a button to spare.</br></br>This is the last place you would think a native of Brooklyn would choose to spend his entire adult life, but Joe Paterno has been here 45 years and he isn't about to go anywhere. After 16 years as an assistant and the past 29 years as a head coach, with national championships in 1982 and 1986 and 15 bowl victories, Paterno is State College. His name has brought top recruits here, brought television networks here, even brought the Big Ten Conference here.</br></br>He turned down other jobs, including an opening at Michigan in 1969 (it went to some guy named Schembechler) and stayed. In a field where unemployment can be just a 5-6 season away, Paterno stayed so long he has become an institution, compiling an all-time record of 261-69-3, for a winning percentage of 78.8. Since Paterno came here, Penn State has moved Beaver Stadium and subsequently made three additions to keep up with fan interest, and its capacity of 93,967 makes it the second-largest on-campus stadium in the country behind Michigan's. In the past 29 years the dimensions of the ball have changed, the width of the uprights has been reduced, and scholarship numbers have shrunk, but Paterno's job title is the same.</br></br>"I never wanted to go as long as I've gone," Paterno said. "I probably was looking around for the first eight or ten years, but after I was here ten years I wasn't going anywhere else."