Happy Birthday Joe

Posted on December 21st, 2006 by Christopher.
Categories: Hilarious, Sports Fanatics.

On this day in 1926, Penn State head football coach Joe Paterno was born in Brooklyn, New York to Angelo and Florence Paterno.

He went to St. Edmond’s Grammar School and Brooklyn Prep before serving the final year of World War II in the Army. From there, he went to Brown University where he played quarterback under head coach Rip Engle. After graduating from Brown, Paterno passed on his acceptance to Boston University law school and decided to follow Engle to Penn State where Engle had become the head coach of the Nittany Lions. In 16 seasons behind Engle, Paterno learned more and more about the game of football until finally succeeding Engle in 1966.

As they say: the rest is history.

Some of his achievements include:

• He has won the Coach-of-the-Year honors for five times from the American Football Coaches Association.
• Sits at No. 2 on the all-time career wins list behind Florida State head coach Bobby Bowden, who currently leads by three wins.
• Has won two National Championships in 1982 and 1986
• Went undefeated and untied five times in his career including the 1968, 1969, 1973, 1986, and 1994 seasons.
• Has the most bowl appearances (32) and bowl wins (21) of any coach.
• He’s the only coach to win the Rose, Sugar, Cotton, Orange and Fiesta bowls.
• Paterno has 20 finishes in the national ranking’s Top Ten and 30 finishes in the Top 20.
• He has sent more than 300 players to the NFL of which 30 have been first-round selections.
• Paterno has had 71 first-team All-Americans as well as 14 Hall of Fame Scholar-Athletes (including Paul Posluszny who won the award this year), 24 first-team Academic All-Americans, and 18 NCAA Postgraduate Scholarship winners.
• Paterno has donated more than $4 million to Penn State.

More importantly in my opinion is this man’s perspective on his job.

At his acceptance speech for the 1991 Hall of Fame dinner, he said,

“What are coaches? Number one, we’re teachers and we’re educators. We have the same obligations as all teachers at our institutions, except we probably have more influence over our young people than anyone other than their families.”

After a season in which Paterno was unable to pull out wins against any of the Lions’ biggest opponents he said

“Just winning is a silly reason to be serious about a game,” he said. “For a kid still in school, devotion to winning football games at nearly any cost may cripple his mind for life. Institutions of higher learning don’t have the moral right to exploit and mislead inexperienced kids that way. The purpose of college football is to serve education, not the other way around. I hound my players to get involved. Ten years from now I want them to look back on college as a wonderful time of expanding themselves - not just four years of playing football.”

I for one hope Joe coaches another few years, gem’s like this only come along once in a lifetime.

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