Two Penn State football coaches are in the spotlight today, for very different reasons. Bill O'Brien won the Bear Bryant Coach of the Year Award on Thursday night, and the role of Joe Paterno in an upcoming biopic about him was chosen: Al Pacino.
CBS Sports reports that Producer Edward R. Pressman confirmed two different important credits in the movie recently: that a director has been chosen (Brian De Palma), and that Pacino will play the deceased Paterno in a movie about the rise and fall of one of American sports most complex characters, who reached sports' highest heights, but had a quick, tumultuous fall toward the end of his life.
The movie, Happy Valley, will be the third time the movie's director and lead actor work together. De Palma and Pacino were both a part of Scarface and Carlito's Way, which each featured complicated characters of their own.
Happy Valley is based off of a biography by former Sports Illustrated Senior Columnist Joe Posnanski, aptly named, Paterno. There is no start or release date for the film yet. No official details about the movie's plot have been publicized either, but the book focused on the final years of Paterno's life, which included the Jerry Sandusky Child Sex Abuse Scandal that ultimately got Paterno fired back in 2011.
In his first year as coach at Penn State, O'Brien took home three coach of the year awards, including the Bear Bryant honor yesterday. He inherited a team with talent that fled for other schools, an university under fire beyond the athletic department, a new university president, and a dearth of supporters outside of State College, Pa.
Despite all of that, O'Brien-after leaving an offensive coordinator position with the National Football League's New England Patriots-led his Nittany Lions team to an 8-4 finish while the NCAA levied sanctions on the organization.
Back in 1986, Paterno was the first recipient of the award. Paterno had been the all-time leader in wins as a Division-1 head coach, but was stripped of each of his victories after 1997, taking that historic claim away from him.
Penn State Football received a four-year bowl ban, and also lost 40 student athlete scholarships over the same timeframe from Jerry Sandusky's child sex abuse and the lack of contact of the police by either Paterno or Graham Spanier, the former president of the university. The allegations against Sandusky didn't gain significant steam until late 2011. O'Brien credited the student athletes who remained with the program with his receiving the award.
In December, O'Brien the Maxwell Club and AT&T ESPN Coach of the Year Awards.
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