You can look at last year and there are so many dynamics in having good chemistry on a football team. We had just come off an eastern division championship and had a lot of players returning. We really felt good about our season and were ranked number three in the preseason. I don't think it was necessarily Erik not being liked at all. From a personal standpoint, you had a senior, very popular, very outgoing quarterback in Rick's personality and a youngster trying to come up and make his way. The dynamics of all that, with the injuries, with the schedule and with us not playing as consistently offensively as we thought we should, it just developed. Instead of making plays to win the games, we ended up making the plays that lost the games. It was very complicated I think.

Phil and I have been on a couple of trips and I've watched his wife beat his backside in tennis I think once or twice. I didn't remember Phil playing against us in '71 and '72 when we played Tennessee down in Knoxville, but I was telling him that Bob Woodruff, the athletic director at that time, was one of the great con guys of all time. We were supposed to have a home and home and he said, `Ah, we can't go back up there. I need another game.' And I said, `I'm not going down to Knoxville to play that early in the year.' And we're in May; we're dickering. I said, `I'm going to fix this. I'm going to say we'll come down only if it's a night game.' Now this is May, and I know they don't have any lights. We became the first night game in the history of Tennessee football and they kicked our rears.

When there's pressure put on the university, on the president, on the athletic director, wherever it comes from, it's tough for them to handle it. At Penn State I've been fortunate enough to outlive most of the boosters. I've buried many a pain-in-the-rear-ends.