Blue State: Virginia's increasingly prominent role in Penn State recruiting
The following story originally appeared in the March 2019 edition of Blue White Illustrated's print magazine. In the time since, Penn State football has added three more verbal commitments to its Class of 2020 out of Virginia, including TE Tyler Warren and CB Joseph Johnson just this week!
By Lou Prato
For nearly four decades, Virginia has been a fertile ground for producing some of Penn State’s best football players, and that trend continues full force into the 2019 season with two incoming prospects projected as high-impact freshmen.
What’s surprising is that no one from Virginia is known to have played on a Penn State varsity football team until 1980. Media guides did not exist until the mid-1960s, and rosters made public over the years dating back to the early 1900s were not as thorough about the background of players. Thus, it’s possible that a Virginian or two are among those Nittany Lions who played before 1980.
It also may be a surprise to learn that the team’s major records for career passing, rushing yardage and receptions are now owned by Virginia players, as Blue White Illustrated magazine editor Matt Herb pointed out when he assigned me to write about this bountiful Southern heritage.
Quarterback Trace McSorley of Ashburn just completed his four-year career as the Nittany Lions’ all-time passing leader in five categories, including yards (9,899) and touchdowns (77). Tailback Evan Royster of Chantilly is the program’s career rushing leader with 3,932 yards on 686 attempts from 2007-10. Wide receiver DaeSean Hamilton of Fredericksburg caught 214 passes from 2014-17, breaking the record of 179 receptions held by another Virginian, Deon Butler of Woodbridge. (Bobby Engram, a South Carolina native, still holds the career records for receiving yardage with 3,026 and receiving touchdowns with 31).
Then there is tailback D.J. Dozier, the first of the Virginia contingent to be a first-team All-American when he was the prime offensive threat in the Nittany Lions’ drive to their second national championship in 1986. Dozier, who hails from Virginia Beach, is the only Penn State player to lead the team in rushing for four years, totaling 3,227 yards on 625 carries, and he still ranks seventh in career rushing yardage.
Three Virginians preceded Dozier, but the first two are virtually unknown to Penn State fans. A spot search of selected varsity rosters over the years since 1887 turned up no one from Virginia until redshirt sophomore offensive guard Lou Bartek of Hampton in 1980, followed in 1982 by redshirt sophomore wide receiver Kevin Campbell of McLean and cornerback Duffy Cobbs of Alexandria. The search included rosters from 1945 through all the teams of the Rip Engle era (1950-65) and the undefeated seasons under Joe Paterno: 1968, ’69 and ’73, as well as the ill-fated 1978 team that lost the national title game to Alabama.
The search also covered the World War II years when the military transferred students from other colleges in and out of many schools, including Penn State, throughout the fall, seemingly on a whim, as they awaited basic training or active duty. Again, none of those players are known to have been from Virginia.
An examination of the rosters in the Penn State football program for its game against Virginia at Beaver Field on Oct. 9, 1954, yielded a fascinating result. That was the first time the teams had played since the inaugural game in 1893. The Cavaliers’ 42-man roster included 22 players from Virginia and five from Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, on Penn State’s 54-man roster were 49 players from Pennsylvania and five from other states. Three of those five out-of-state players became historic figures: tackle Rosey Grier (a future actor-musician and political activist) and quarterback Milt Plum (a future 13-year NFL quarterback) were from New Jersey, and end Jesse Arnelle (a future nationally renown attorney and president of the Penn State board of trustees) was from New York. By the time the Lions played Virginia the next season at Richmond’s City Stadium, Grier and Arnelle had graduated. Penn State won both games rather handily, and the schools didn’t meet again until 1988.
Penn State did play another team from Virginia before 1988: William & Mary in 1922, ’52, ’57 and ’84, winning all four games. A check of William & Mary’s 42-man roster in the 1952 game program found 20 players from Virginia and eight from Pennsylvania. That included junior back John Bednarik of Bethlehem, Pa. – the younger brother of the famous Penn and Philadelphia Eagles linebacker Chuck Bednarik – who was good enough the next season to earn honorable mention All-America honors from United Press International. The 1957 game program showed nearly an even split, with 14 players from Virginia and 13 from Pennsylvania.
Shortly after Paterno became head coach in 1966, he decided to start a summer camp for high school players to enhance the Nittany Lions’ recruiting. Whether he came up with the idea himself or borrowed it from another coaching peer is not clear. Today, there are summer football camps nationwide operated by colleges and independent groups. In Paterno’s early years, the camps were off campus at the Pioneer Ranch in Cook Forest, about 100 miles northwest of State College. By 1970, the Penn State camps were being run on campus and were thriving.
In the late 1970s, Paterno adjusted his recruiting strategy again by expanding the Nittany Lions’ recruiting base to any area within an approximate 300-mile radius of State College. The new blueprint put an increased emphasis on Virginia, Maryland and the Washington, D.C., area. John Rosenberg, the Lions’ defensive backs coach and recruiting coordinator from 1974-77, was assigned that area.
Former athletic director Tim Curley, who had joined the football staff in 1977 as a graduate assistant, remembers Paterno promoting him to a part-time assistant coach position in the late summer of 1979 and sending him on the road. “I was sort of the recruiting coordinator,” he said. “I took a car and went on the road for four months in the fall, starting in Virginia. I went to high school practices and games and worked my way up from Virginia.” It wasn’t until 1981 that a new recruiting coordinator was officially designated. The job went to Fran Ganter, who was also the running backs coach.
The expanded recruiting policy, combined with the thriving summer camps, gave Penn State a presence in areas outside of the Northeastern and Ohio scholastic football hotbeds that had provided most of the Lions’ players over the years.
“We brought high school coaches in from all over to help us in the camps, including Virginia and later South Carolina and Florida,” said Dick Anderson, then Penn State’s offensive line coach. “So we made friends with those guys, and the connections helped us in recruiting. After the camps, you’d go into the area, talk to the coaches and get a good idea of what’s there.”
Although Bartek and Campbell were pioneers in the influx of players emanating from the new approach, they were really outliers. Bartek initiated his own recruitment, and Campbell may have done so, too.
“I didn’t want to play in the South because I didn’t like the environment,” Bartek recalled in a recent telephone conversation. “I began looking up North and out West. Because of the quality of our team, we always had [college] coaches coming every day to our practice. I was interested in Penn State because of its reputation for academics as well as football, and they had a marine science minor that I was interested in. I talked with my high school coach, and he reached out to Penn State for me.”
The coach at Bethel High was Dennis Kozlowski, and Bartek was actually the second player he steered to Penn State. Two years before, Kozlowski had contacted the Lions’ coaching staff about a defensive end, John Sturdivant. Penn State started recruiting him, but whether he was offered a scholarship has not been confirmed. Sturdivant decided to attend Maryland and went on to have a five-year pro career.
Bartek made visits to a few schools, but his Penn State trip didn’t go as well as he expected.
“Penn State had a very low-key recruiting coach and I didn’t get much of a chance to talk to Dick Anderson, who would have been my line coach,” Bartek remembered. “Although I had a good visit, I didn’t have a good sense that they wanted me to be there. I thought, if I’m going to go someplace, at least I want to walk in the door where they’re happy I want to be there. So I decided I was going to go to Ohio State because I had a teammate there. I called the [Penn State] coaches to let them know, and when I explained why they said, ‘Why don’t you give us a chance to remedy that.’ ”
The first Penn State coach to talk to Bartek on his home grounds was Kit Cartwright, a part-time assistant in 1978. Then Paterno and Anderson flew in and “made a favorable impression” on Bartek and his family.
“I was also looking for a place where things were done in an intelligent manner, where everything was done for a reason, where not a lot of nonsense was going on,” Bartek said, “and where you’re treated like adults as opposed to where everyone is screaming at you like we’re animals. That didn’t happen at Penn State. We all referred to the coaches by their first name and they did the same to us. I never heard anyone yell at me in my years at Penn State. They explained things matter-of-factly, as opposed to yelling at you.”
Like most incoming freshmen, Bartek had envisioned becoming a starter quickly and “getting a shot” at an NFL career. Reality set in that fall. Ahead of him at the guard positions were a couple of experienced veterans, as well as two future first-round NFL draft choices, Mike Munchak and Sean Farrell, both sophomore backups at the time.
“The good thing about that was that every day in practice you were playing with great players,” Bartek said. “I spent about half of the year on the scout team and half of the year as a backup behind Sean Farrell. I made the traveling squad and played in a few games that season. After a year or so, you get a sense of where you fit in the pecking order. But then the guys who came in with my class began to bypass me.”
After playing as a backup to Farrell in the first two games of the 1980 season, Bartek was injured and took a medical redshirt. He subbed for Farrell in 1981, but not enough to earn a letter. With the approval of Paterno, Bartek missed spring practice in 1982 because he needed to complete a mostly off-campus internship to fulfill an academic requirement in his maritime curriculum
“When I came back, I was at the bottom of the heap,” Bartek said. “I worked my way up, but [the coaches] decided to go with the freshmen and younger guys. So I was on the scout team for the first game.”
The next week, Bartek was moved back to the active squad and became the backup to three-year starter and co-captain Pete Speros. With injures hindering Speros throughout the season, Bartek saw plenty of playing time on the team that won Penn State’s first national championship. He decided to forgo his senior season in 1983 to take two mandatory courses that were only offered in the fall – courses that he needed to get into graduate school.
Anderson said he has a lot of respect for Bartek. “Lou was not a great player, which is the majority of the kids you recruit,” he said. “You get a good common thread with players like Lou, good kids and good workers who have some degree of maturity and leadership.”
Reflecting back, Bartek is happy he played at Penn State and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in earth science. “Penn State was a great experience for me, and I wish I had played more,” he said. “I played at the highest level and I know where I fit.” He loves Penn State and is very loyal to Paterno’s legacy. He also believes his football career may have turned out differently if that critical internship had not forced him to miss spring practice in 1982. Yet his academic pursuits led to a postgraduate career as a professor of geosciences. He spent eight years at Alabama and 17 at North Carolina before retiring in 2016.
Kevin Campbell was a sophomore on the 1982 national championship team, but he hardly played during his four years at Penn State, catching his first pass in ’82 for 14 yards and five more for 49 yards in his senior year. Campbell had several talented receivers ahead of him on the depth chart, including All-American Kenny Jackson, Gregg Garrity, Kevin Baugh, Rocky Washington, Eric Hamilton, Herb Bellamy and Sid Lewis. Even his position coach, Booker Brooks, cannot remember him.
Campbell may be the first Virginia player Penn State actively recruited, because the Nittany Lions’ foray into the state was just heating up. Campbell was contacted by email but he declined to be interviewed, perhaps because he was too busy. Since 2001, Dr. Kevin Campbell has been a critical care surgeon and attending physician in the Emergency Department at Prince William Hospital in Arlington, Va.
If not Campbell, then Duffy Cobbs was probably the first Virginian to be recruited under the new strategy. Cobbs turned out to be a gem, a diminutive cornerback who was part of the hard-hitting Penn State secondary nicknamed ‘the Smurfs,” that made life miserable for Miami receivers in the Lions’ 14-10 Fiesta Bowl victory for the national championship,
An injury early in his senior year at Alexandria’s Groveton High School forced him to walk on in 1982 as a running back and wide receiver, but an NCAA rule change that year allowing redshirting gave Cobbs time to develop as a defensive back. By 1986, four other Virginians were on the championship team: Dozier, defensive backs Dwayne Downing (Chesapeake) and Gary Wilkerson (Dinwiddie) and offensive lineman Tim Freeman (Virginia Beach). The Virginia wellspring was now flourishing at Penn State, with future NFL players like Darren Perry (Chesapeake), Keith Goganious (Virginia Beach), David Macklin (Newport News), Levi Brown (Norfolk) and Michael Robinson (Richmond) becoming Nittany Lions.
The vital pipeline continued into the Bill O’Brien and James Franklin coaching eras with the now-departed Hamilton, McSorley and Nick Scott (Fairfax), and the 2019 roster that includes such quality players as junior defensive end Yetur Gross-Matos (Spotsylvania), sophomore running back Ricky Slade (Woodbridge), redshirt sophomore linebacker Ellis Brooks (Mechanicsville) and a pair of Rivals100 freshmen: linebacker Brandon Smith (Louisa) and running back Devyn Ford (Stafford).
One can look at the Virginia seniors-to-be who are being recruited for the 2020 class and wonder how many of them are destined to continue the migration to Happy Valley.