/arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-pmn.s3.amazonaws.com/public/H2JYZAM5ZZF35KL3CMGUM6PVCQ.jpg)
This should probably begin with the obvious: that a lot of people who could not pick Bill O'Brien out of a lineup already have concluded that he is destined to fail as the Penn State football coach; that a lot of people who have never seen him draw an X or an O on a whiteboard, and who - most importantly - have never seen what he looks like or sounds like in an 18-year-old's living room, have decided that O'Brien is not the guy (or, rather, that he is the guy keeping the seat warm for a couple of years until the storm blows itself out and the school can hire the real guy). So there's that.
Welcome, Bill.
The social media outrage makes for splendid reading. The former-player outrage is a hoot, too. They wanted an inside hire, a Penn State person, not an unknown NFL assistant coach, and they want to be heard. In what will stand as an early entrant in anyone's quote-of-the-year contest, former linebacker LaVar Arrington told BlueWhiteIllustrated.com that he was through with Penn State. In the highest of dudgeon, he said, "I will put my Alamo Bowl MVP trophy in storage."
(But if Arrington does that, if he boxes up the shiny gold trophy, how will he be able to gaze upon his own reflection? More importantly, how will the program possibly survive?)
The absurdity of this is self-evident. O'Brien is a blank canvas in many ways. The guy could be Rockne for all any of us knows. The point is, nobody does know. So this is not about O'Brien.
Instead, this is about where the Penn State football program stands in the weeks after the revulsion and the ensuing convulsion. This hiring is a mirror onto its current state of existence.
Which is to say, wandering.
Former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky is still maintaining his innocence in the face of 10 young men accusing him of sexual misconduct, and worse, when they were minors. Legendary head coach Joe Paterno, fired amid a public outcry that he did not do enough to stop Sandusky, is being treated for lung cancer. University president Graham Spanier has been shoved aside and replaced by Rodney Erickson. Athletic director Tim Curley and school vice president Gary Schultz are awaiting trial on perjury charges.
Amid all of that, a search committee led by acting AD Dave Joyner was cobbled together to find Paterno's replacement, and the college football community held up that mirror in reply and told Penn State exactly where its football program is currently located.
Which is to say, in the wilderness.
An athletic director who has never been an athletic director before just hired a head coach who has never been a head coach before, and that is what happens when your program is set on fire. Nobody should be surprised. The fact that people seem to be surprised tells you just how delusional people can be.
The relatively unknown offensive coordinator of the New England Patriots was not on any list of conventional candidates (or even unconventional candidates, for that matter). This does not make him unqualified. It just makes him the kind of guy you hire when none of the more obvious choices wants anything to do with you. That is just the reality, and everybody at Penn State had better start getting used to it.
By all rights, this should have been longtime assistant coach Tom Bradley's job. Everybody knows that, just as everybody knows that there was no way on earth that Penn State could hire someone from within to replace Paterno. It had to be an outsider.
This is not a reflection on Bradley, who has reportedly done a lot of the heavy lifting in recruiting for years and who has comported himself admirably in the weeks since hell descended upon Happy Valley. But there is no way, in the middle of all of this, that you could give the job to somebody with extensive past ties to Sandusky.
You can say it is unfair all you want, and it might very well be, but a coach and a staff which had to begin every recruiting pitch to every parent with a preamble about their history with Sandusky were never going to be the answer. That is just the cold reality. Nobody at Penn State likes it, and most think it is grossly unfair, but to pretend that the public relations of the thing doesn't exist is to do just that: pretend.
O'Brien will now be asked to perform the neat trick of salvaging what is left of the current Penn State recruiting class while simultaneously continuing to coach the Patriots in the playoffs. It is just one more complication in a situation defined by complications.
Whether Bill O'Brien can lead them out of this mess is another question entirely, asked but unanswerable. All we now know for sure is exactly the distance Penn State needs to travel.
Send email to hofmanr@phillynews.com,
or read his blog, The Idle Rich, at
For recent columns go to