Penn State coach Joe Paterno doesn't like playing freshmen; maybe he's onto something

The Pittsburgh Steelers are the NFL's version of Linebacker U.

What's their secret?

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Judy Battista of the New York Times wrote a superb article on the Steeler linebacking corps...

For 40 years, Pittsburgh has churned out linebackers as reliably as the old mills forged steel. Jack Lambert’s jersey remains a best seller 21 years after he was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and his ferocious play — pummeling quarterbacks, pounding running backs — set the standard for a franchise that will try to win its seventh Super Bowl on Sunday the old-school way, with defense. Lambert and his teammate and fellow Hall of Fame member Jack Ham were both second-round draft picks.

But it is the current iteration of the Steelers that has come close to perfecting the care and feeding of linebackers, unearthing them even in the draft’s late rounds, sometimes changing their positions, keeping plenty of them in the pipeline and then making them sit, marinating in a difficult defense until its details seep in.

It is an approach summed up by the position’s current guru, the Steelers’ linebackers coach, Keith Butler.

“I don’t like rookies,” Butler said in an interview last week. “I don’t trust them. And until I’m comfortable with them, they won’t play. I usually get comfortable with them around their second or third year.”

If you substitute "freshmen" for "rookies" that could easily be a quote from Joe Paterno!

There are also college football recruiting lessons in the Steelers' draft analysis...

Butler looks for two things when studying college linebackers: whether they can run and whether they can hit. Those things, Butler said, he cannot teach.

Then the scouting department looks for flaws — drunken-driving incidents, domestic violence issues, some kind of physical shortcoming. Those players are downgraded on the Steelers’ draft board.

Original content Penn State Clips