For years, Joe Paterno has been a live wire for Penn State's football program. But times have changed, and the surest sign of a new era in State College has been the incremental official reintegration of Paterno in increasingly more prominent ways. New coach Matt Campbell's playbook is clear, with several not-so-subtle homages to Paterno.
Campbell continually states that he's honoring the past and just trying to focus on football. He's been inviting back former Nittany Lions players from decades past over his first few months on the job, a common tactic by new coaches. But acknowledging Penn State's significant football history is impossible to do without directly acknowledging Paterno, and that is difficult without acknowledging how his tenure ended.
Paterno was fired in 2011 in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky child sexual abuse scandal after 62 total seasons coaching at Penn State. An independent investigation in 2012 overseen by a former FBI director found that Paterno knew as early as 1998 that there were concerns about Sandusky's conduct with children and that administrators, as well as Paterno, "failed to protect against a child sexual predator harming children for over a decade." Bill O'Brien took over in 2012, and under heavy sanctions, including scholarship reduction and postseason bans, coached the Nittany Lions for two seasons and then left in a blaze of glory with blunt frustration regarding part of the Penn State fanbase he felt was still loyal to Paterno (specifically, O'Brien was responding to criticism he had fired one of Paterno's last remaining holdover assistant coaches): "You can print this: You can print that I don't really give a [expletive] what the 'Paterno people' think about what I do with this program. I've done everything I can to show respect to Coach Paterno.
So I could really care less about what the Paterno faction of people, or whatever you call them, think about what I do with the program. "For any 'Paterno person' to have any objection to what I'm doing, it makes me wanna put my fist through this windshield right now." James Franklin largely held that faction at arm's length as he went about the work of modernizing the program and leading it to the ceiling of success he never truly was able to break through, and eventually got him ousted from the job at the end of 2025. In some ways, he was able to do so because he had so much success, but eventually, his rope ran out.
But as Terry Smith campaigned for the permanent job after being named interim late last season, direct associations with Paterno became more blatant. Smith wore a 409 pin to honor Paterno, whom he played for at Penn State. It signified the number of wins Paterno won while in charge, which was an NCAA record that the organization stripped from Paterno, then posthumously restored, and is a catch-all rallying cry for Paterno supporters.
It was a clear appeal to some of those so-called Paterno people in order to lobby support to get the permanent job. Instead, Matt Campbell was hired, and with him arrived the most visible school associations to Paterno yet (Campbell retained Smith on staff). It starts with the last thing the Nittany Lions see before they take the field at home.
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