Super Bowl Monday_ From the Persian Gulf to the Shores of West Florida - Adam Lazarus [9]
“[East Brady] was a small town, I think we only had about thirty players on our football team. And in that community everything was about football, everything was sports. I think we only had about seven hundred people in our hometown,” Kelly recalled. “But the bottom line is we had passion, we took it serious. We wanted to win, we were used to winning.”
All that winning enticed powerhouse colleges programs—Tennessee, the University of Pittsburgh, Notre Dame—to court Kelly. But at the outset, only one school mattered.
“I wanted to play for Penn State, I wanted to play quarterback there. Penn State was my team. Where I’m from you’re either Pitt or Penn State and I was always a Nittany Lion fan.”
Paterno’s assistant, J. T. White, handled Kelly’s recruitment, visiting the boy’s home and attending his high school basketball games. But Penn State’s interest didn’t exactly mesh with Kelly’s boyhood dream. Paterno had already signed Terry Rakowski, from North Schuylkill, Pennsylvania, and Frank Rocco, from Fox Chapel, Pennsylvania, each a high school all-American quarterback. Content with his quarterback prospects, Paterno offered Kelly a scholarship as a linebacker.
“Well, look at it like this,” Pat Kelly told his younger brother about a possible switch in positions, “I’ve been in football a long time and I’ve been on a lot of team planes. And I can tell you that the pretty flight attendants never ask where the linebackers are; they want to know where the quarterback’s sitting.”
Jim never again considered becoming a Nittany Lion.
“Quarterback was the only position for me. And nothing was about to change that. Not even a full scholarship offer from Penn State. I do give Paterno a lot of credit for being up-front with me before I signed on the dotted line. When talking to recruits, a lot of college coaches promise the moon, the stars, and the sun . . . and the kids end up being left in one big fog.”
Jim Kelly was not the only western Pennsylvania boy during the late 1970s that didn’t quite agree with the fabled Nittany Lions head coach.
Within a few weeks of signing the paperwork committing to Penn State, Jeff Hostetler received some off-putting news. Sports Illustrated had listed the nation’s top ten recruiting classes. Penn State had been ranked fourth, behind the University of Southern California, Notre Dame, and Southern Methodist (who had just nabbed a pair of star running backs, the famed “Pony Express” backfield of Eric Dickerson and Craig James). One phrase in the summary of Penn State’s class stunned the entire Hostetler family.
“Lots of big linemen, the nation’s premier tight end, Mike McCloskey, a hot quarterback prospect in Todd Blackledge, and, of course, a future All-American linebacker, Jeff Hostetler.”
Norm Hostetler compounded the confusion by telling reporters on signing day: “Jeff only wanted to go to college as a quarterback and Penn State is recruiting him as a quarterback. He has an understanding that they’ll let him stay at the position as long as he wants to.”
Hostetler was never guaranteed the quarterback’s job, and appropriately, Penn State added depth to the roster by recruiting other quarterbacks, such as Blackledge, a top prospect from Canton, Ohio. Frank Rocco and Terry Rakowski—the quarterbacks who kept Jim Kelly away from Happy Valley—were also on scholarship. A crowded quarterback pool for the 1979 season, Hostetler’s freshman year, made sense: Chuck Fusina, the Heisman Trophy runner-up a year earlier, had just graduated.
Paterno settled on junior Dayle Tate to run his offense, but each one