Bill O'Brien: A Penn State Appreciation

Former coach Bill O'Brien stabilized Penn State football at its most uncertain time. For that, Lions fans still should be grateful.

The day the Houston Texans fired Bill O'Brien also happened to be the seventh anniversary of maybe his strangest loss at Penn State.

On Oct. 5, 2013, Indiana scored 23 fourth-quarter points in a 44-24 victory that remains part of Hoosiers' history. The win was Indiana's first against Penn State, and also its last. The Lions are 22-1 vs. the Hoosiers, who always will have that day in Bloomington.

That memory loomed as a side note to Monday's news that Houston had fired O'Brien, its head coach and general manager, after an 0-4 start to his seventh season. O'Brien's overbearing managerial style likely cost him in Houston, and he has a certain brusqueness whose charm can fade with losses.

Still, O'Brien knows how to take punches and counter back, meaning he'll find success elsewhere. Remember what happened the week after that Indiana game? Penn State defeated Michigan 43-40, in four overtimes, on the most electric night of his short but vital stay at Penn State.

This, then, is an appreciation for what O'Brien did at Penn State, a school stinging from the Jerry Sandusky scandal when he arrived and wondering about the future, or even importance, of football.

Three weeks after taking the job, which he performed concurrently while running the New England Patriots' offense to Super Bowl XLVI,  O'Brien made his second public appearance as Penn State's coach. At Joe Paterno's funeral.

In the week before the Super Bowl, O'Brien spoke to hundreds of football lettermen and led the players to Paterno's viewing, where many stood in an honor guard for their late coach. It was an exhausting whirlwind of circumstances (O'Brien was sleeping barely 4 hours a night) that was followed a week later by his first Signing Day at Penn State.

O'Brien had nothing but exhausting whirlwinds for two years. In July 2012, he arrived in Chicago for the Big Ten media days suppressing a rage at the NCAA's newly announced sanctions that threatened to make his program irrelevant. O'Brien, his newly formed staff and a host of seniors spent the next few weeks convincing players simply to stay.

Ultimately, Penn State went 8-4 in 2012, which the film "Iron Lions" called the 'greatest 8-4 season ever played," and O'Brien won multiple coach-of-the-year awards.

"What Bill did was phenomenal," the Big Ten Network's Matt Millen said in a 2019 interview. "He brought them back."

O'Brien certainly ran into some uneven moments on the field, most notably that 2013 loss to Indiana, followed by a 63-14 beatdown at Ohio State three weeks later.

But during his two seasons in State College, O'Brien did far more than win 15 games. He reset the football program, began rebuilding its infrastructure from the weight room to the video technology, and set a foundation on which James Franklin was able to continue building.

Halfway through his two seasons at Penn State, O'Brien called a press conference, where he sought to address rumors about NFL interests, both on his and the league's behalf. He was forthright about being courted, and being interested, but said, "I am very proud to be the head football coach here."

O'Brien chose his words carefully, adding that he considered the NFL to be the "highest level of coaching" and certainly not downplaying his interest. A year later, he was gone to Houston.

That was to be expected, even at Penn State, which wasn't used to coaches leaving for other jobs. The important thing, though, was that O'Brien left Penn State better than he found it.

In 2012, when Penn State hired O'Brien, few gave him much of a chance to succeed. Except Mickey Kwiatkowski, who coached O'Brien at Brown in the 1990s.

Kwiatkowski said that few players maximized their opportunities like O'Brien. And he implored Penn State fans to give O'Brien a chance.

"In time, and I know it will take time because there are a lot of wounds to heal, I truly believe people will say, 'Can you believe how lucky we were to get Billy O'Brien?'"

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