It's official: the offseason theme for the Penn State football team has been set, and it's BYOB.
No, no, it's not the "Bring Your Own Bottle" sort of BYOB. It's something different, thought up by one 77-year-old football coach.
"Do you know what BYOB means?" Penn State coach Joe Paterno asked his team at the final practice of the 2004 season, as quizzical looks emerged. "It means bust your own butt to get the ball."
But on that day before the final Michigan State game, setting the tone for the next season with words wasn't enough. So Paterno took it to the field -- as the scout team wideout -- and started running rocket screens, trying, as best he could, to bust his butt to get to the ball.
He probably wasn't an all-too effective wideout because, protest as he might, he can't move like he's 20. And his players were, without a doubt, doing everything possible to hamper his chances, as one even turned the whole BYOB bit around, into Be Your Own Blocker, Coach.
But that wasn't the point. The point was that the team should be able to carry something from the 2004 season into next year, and that something would be a theme -- Bust Your Own Butt -- that would hopefully turn into an all-encompassing attitude. And there was no more appropriate point in time to set that theme than the final week of the season.
"We practiced hard on Tuesday, Wednesday, heck, [Paterno] put pads on them Thursday," defensive coordinator Tom Bradley said. "And he said, 'Hey if I can't count on you guys to play football, just because I put some pads on because I want to get one or another things done, and you're not ready for this football game, then we don't have a football team.'
"Was he setting the tone for next year? Absolutely."
BYOB in that final week also set the tone for something else -- a final victory, which was the perfect way to enter the offseason. And the win helped ensure that this team, which formulated the common idea of the season having started anew just before the Indiana win, felt like a 2-0 team -- not a 4-7 team, or a 1-1 team or anything else.
BYOB, huh? Sounds pretty good. Except, of course, for the case when it was "Be Your Own Blocker" for Paterno the wideout.
"One of the guys wanted to know if we could hit [Paterno] above the waist," Bradley said. "I said, 'Make your own mistakes.' Then they called [senior linebacker Derek] Wake over and said, 'Wake you're out of here, so you hit him.' "
Hit or not, Paterno apparently survived. But it's probably safer to leave the BYOB theme more explicitly -- at Bust Your Own Butt. Seems to work wonders.
