The March Sadness of Penn State

The first basketball coach I remember watching combust his way straight out of my hometown was a man named Dick Harter. He coached five seasons at Penn State, in the college town where I grew up, and he did the best he could with the roster of outcasts and Brickowskis laid before him, and then he left for the NBA in 1983. No one really blamed him. Penn State had an utterly forgettable basketball team, and the expectations were so minimal, with the football program in its heyday, that no one ever believed it would get better.

Three decades later, it remains a perpetual struggle, interrupted by the occasionally shocking out-of-nowhere success story. That will not happen this season: Penn State, the No. 10 seed in the Big Ten tournament, lost to No. 7-seeded Ohio State, 79-75, on Thursday in Indianapolis, most likely relegating this team, at best, to its perpetual home in the National Invitation Tournament. (The old saw goes that you can't spell Nittany Lions without "N-I-T.")

I don't mean to be entirely dour about the future: Penn State actually improved quite a bit under coach Pat Chambers late in the season. This was actually the first time ever that Penn State did not wind up competing in one of the Wednesday play-in games at the Big Ten tournament, which is the kind of desperately optimistic flourish you cling to when you've witnessed 30 years of perpetual mediocrity. The Nittany Lions also have their best recruiting class ever coming in next year, but the truth is that Chambers is working against a long and ignominious history in a historically strong basketball conference, and I imagine he knows it better than anyone.

Which raises the question, in the wake of Ohio State beating Penn State, and extending the Buckeyes' chances of making the NCAA tournament for the eighth straight year: Why exactly is it that certain schools are able to get their shit together in both the major men's revenue sports, and others can't? The models of this in recent years have been Ohio State and Florida, which famously won national titles in both football and basketball in the same year (2006). A handful of schools in the Big Ten, including Wisconsin and Michigan State, have been at least quite good in both sports, as has Notre Dame.

But very often, it doesn't work that way. Very often, the specter of football is so huge that it tends to overshadow the basketball program altogether. I'm thinking of schools like USC and Florida State and Penn State and Clemson, unquestioned football schools that can't seem to find a consistent footing in basketball, as well as much of the Southeastern Conference outside of Florida and Kentucky.

Culture, obviously, plays a huge role in this, particularly in the South, where spring football often holds far more allure than the culmination of basketball season. It's easy, then, for schools like Arkansas to perpetually underachieve without anyone much caring, so long as it doesn't impact the football program. It's not that they aren't trying; it's just that the public censure for failure is so much less severe.

Speaking of public censure, Penn State was pilloried for its overbearing football culture in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky child-rape scandal in 2011. Earlier that year, something smaller and less consequential happened, but it was something so strange that it drew national media attention: Ed DeChellis, Penn State's then-basketball coach, left his position to take a job at the Naval Academy, thereby becoming the first coach ever to depart the Big Ten for the Patriot League. This is the kind of step down a college coach almost never takes voluntarily. To be fair, DeChellis might have seen the writing on the wall in terms of his own lack of a future at Penn State, but he'd also become so frustrated by the school's lack of commitment to his program that he felt he had no choice. The low point, undoubtedly, came when the basketball team was forced out of its home arena and relegated to practice in a third-rate intramural building because of a Bon Jovi concert rehearsal and a career fair.

I suspect this is not the kind of thing that would happen at Ohio State. Maybe, at this point, it wouldn't happen at Penn State anymore, but the problem is that it did, and for so long that it is not very simple to overcome. Schools like Ohio State have a long tradition to rest upon, and natural recruiting bases; schools like Penn State, Florida State, and Clemson don't have those things at all.

Sometimes, a force of personality is enough to turn a program around. At South Carolina, Frank Martin is poised to lead the Gamecocks to their first NCAA tournament since 2004. At USC, Andy Enfield has imported the up-tempo offense that made his Florida Gulf Coast team an NCAA sensation, and won 20 games this season. Penn State had that kind of opportunity in 2011, when Larry Brown expressed interest in replacing DeChellis. Maybe, given Brown's perpetual inability to operate within the rules, that would have proved a Faustian bargain. There is hope, even now, but that hope is couched in decades of futility. Some schools are lucky enough to have it all. My school—and maybe yours, too—just isn't one of them.