8 More Reasons to Be a Fan of Penn State’s Terry Smith

Penn State safeties coach Deon Broomfield was born in 1991, the same year his fellow defensive backfield coach Terry Smith was a Nittany Lion football team captain.

That season, Smith helped lead Penn State to an 11-2 record, wins over Notre Dame and in the Fiesta Bowl, and a final ranking of No. 3 in the nation. As a 5-foot-8, 155-pound shifty and savvy wide receiver, Smith had 55 receptions for eight touchdowns to complete his PSU career with 108 catches, at the time the third-most career receptions in school history.

Broomfield, like many of the coaches on the Penn State football staff and two dozen players on the roster, came to Penn State from Iowa State with new head coach Matt Campbell over the winter. Smith has been the program’s bridge and mainstay, sticking with the Nittany Lions through thick and thin and thin last season as the team’s interim head coach.

Campbell, smartly, kept Smith on staff. And Smith, whose family includes multiple generations of Penn State alumni, stayed home. He’s associate head coach and a voice that Campbell listens to.

“My associate role is different and bigger than [it was] under James [Franklin],” Smith has said. “Coach Campbell has conversations with me about how he wants to do different things. I’ll share my insight to certain things, and ultimately he has to make the final decision.”

There’s no doubt that Broomfield listens to Smith as well. Smith coaches the cornerbacks, Broomfield the safeties. They intersect constantly, on and off the field. Which, for Broomfield, is a good thing: He is a big fan of his seasoned co-worker and staff sage. Broomfield leads off this Terry Smith Update with insight into the man who wore No. 8 as a Nittany Lion and is now respectfully called The OG by Penn Staters in and out of Lasch Building:

1. THE MENTOR: “I love working with Terry,” Broomfield told me last week. “I call him the governor of the state. Anywhere we go, everybody knows Terry Smith. When you’re in the meeting rooms and on the field with him, he’s a veteran leader who communicates at a high level. You can just tell he has a respect from the players, and I think that kind of trickles down. When we’re in the meeting room, we bounce around ideas from techniques to fundamentals. He brings a wealth of knowledge that younger coaches just try to soak up and learn from it.”

2. “IF YOU DON’T STAND FOR SOMETHING, YOU’LL FALL FOR ANYTHING.” More from Broomfield: “That’s Terry’s biggest message. You hear him saying it to his guys. You see how the guys take to that, and they echo some of that. It’s the attitude and the effort. He coaches his guys really hard. There’s an expectation of toughness that he brings to it — it’s just the toughness and the grit that he coaches his guys with, for sure.”

3. CHANGING WITH THE TIMES: Smith’s first training camp as a Penn State wide receiver under Joe Paterno was almost four decades ago. “You know, when I played in the Dark Ages, we had three-a-days [practices],” Smith shared. “And they were all contact. Now you have these acclimation periods. You have certain days where you can have full pads. Certain days where you got to go shoulder pads and helmets. Some days you can’t have anything. So, you know the contact has changed.”

On top of that, Smith said that Penn State under Campbell hits less in practice than Penn State did under Franklin. Less contact = greater challenges.

“It’s more strategic,” Smith said of this summer’s camp at Penn State. “There are certain days that we’re going to do a little bit more contact, whereas in the past we did contact almost every day. So, it’s just a little bit different in that sense. I went to watch the Steelers practice right before we started, and our practices mirror kind of what the Steelers are doing — in a sense that it’s more teaching.”

4. TERRY TOUGH. Less practice contact is “the greatest challenge faced by a team that declares itself a physical team,” Smith added. “How do you get enough contact to know you’re tough without beating up your team? And there’s a fine line to that. All teams kind of juggle that line — you don’t know until that very first game can you tackle or can you push a guy off the ball on the offensive line? I think our camp here has been really, really demanding. I think it’s been really physical and tough.”

5. CMC IS TOUGH TOO, Smith made sure to note: “I do think we have a tough football team, and that starts with the head coach. He’s tough. He’s tough on us. He’s tough on the team, and he’s demanding accountability to the team. And you know, it’s blue collar, and it’s what we need and what we desire to be.”

“When you say ‘us,’ is he tough on the staff, Terry?” I asked.

“Yeah, all great leaders are tough on everyone involved,” he said. “You know, we’re all expected to do a job, and we have to deliver.”

6. THE RIGHT ROLE: A reporter (not me) started a question to Smith this way last week: “Terry, if you could put on your interim head coach hat for one question…” Smith quickly interrupted, courteously yet firmly: “No. No. No. I’m not the interim head coach.”

7. NEW ERA: As the featured speaker at a July fundraiser for Penn State’s Adaptive Athletetics program, a fired-up Smith told a packed house of 450 people: “This is the most exciting time at Penn State in over a decade.” I was in the audience for Smith’s rousing pep talk to the audience. Half of his speech was from meticulously prepared notes and half was straight from his heart.

8. THE TASK AT HAND: On Thursday, midway through Penn State’s training camp, Smith made this declaration, 250-plus days into the Campbell Era and an offseason of transition and relationship-building: “It’s all football now. It’s no speaking engagements, no banquets, none of that kind of stuff. It’s football season. This is the greatest time of year. You know, it’s the greatest time for you the reporters, too, right? Because you get to cover us live. And it’s the greatest time for us and our fans. I love August.”