Christian Hackenberg has something to prove. At Penn State.
STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — After she ran out of wooden spoons, Nicole Hackenberg turned to the cheese grater.
Mothers everywhere will understand such threats, empty as they are: Cut down on the racket — or any other motherly complaint aimed at rambunctiously misbehaving children — or face drastic measures.
Keep in mind that the matriarch of the Hackenberg clan had four sons and no daughters; the kitchen-drawer supply of menacing wooden spoons had been exhausted long ago, one byproduct of a competitive family of athletic boys careening inside and out of the family's Palmyra, Va., home.
Pity the mother, but blame the father. Both parents were athletes: Nicole Hackenberg was an all-conference volleyball player at Lehigh, and her husband, Erick, was once a backup quarterback at Virginia. It was from Erick that the Hackenberg boys got their competitiveness, from games and never-ending sibling rivalries pitting one against the other, two against two, three against one, with a few simple rules — keep it outside, and wipe your feet.
If we're all products of our environment, Christian Hackenberg's upbringing bred not just the physical gifts that make the junior one of college football's most promising talents — a future first-round NFL draft pick, by most accounts — but an uncompromising competitor, one whose inextinguishable drive was tested during an uneven sophomore season.
"That's where it started," Hackenberg said. "And it trickled over into everything."
As a true freshman starter under former Penn State coach Bill O'Brien, Hackenberg threw for nearly 3,000 yards, 20 touchdowns and just 10 interceptions; as a sophomore under O'Brien's successor, James Franklin, he completed a weaker percentage of his attempts, tossed just 12 touchdowns and accounted for 15 interceptions, the latter tying for the most in the Big Ten Conference.
So what happened to the future star? Better yet, how has Hackenberg reconciled a desire for perfection with a decidedly imperfect turn to his young career — or, for a 20-year-old still learning to manage frustration and adversity, is such a realization even a possibility?
The former question is easier to answer than the latter, but the solutions are intertwined.
"He's such a competitor," offensive coordinator John Donovan said. "He wants to win all the games and he wants to be the reason why, too. That's awesome. But you can't take chances that might help you lose. He's got such a competitive spirit that he takes it to heart when we do lose."
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Penn State coaches who work closest with Hackenberg — Franklin, Donovan and quarterbacks coach Ricky Rahne — preach the same refrain: There's nothing wrong with our quarterback.
The gift of hindsight supports this point. From the first day of spring ball more than a year ago, when Penn State's roster reconvened behind a new staff, two potential stumbling blocks stood in Hackenberg's path: one the coaching change itself, with its subtle tweaks to an effective offensive system, and the second the near-wholesale shift in his offensive supporting cast.
"It's easy for you to say it now and for us to say it now," Franklin said, "but fans and media in general … if you have a quarterback, they don't care about anything else. If you have a quarterback, that's all you need. You're going to win the championship because you have a quarterback. Though it's a very important piece of the puzzle, you need to have the other pieces to complement it."
Some things are impossible to replicate on a practice field or in a film room. Take, for example, a wide receiver's altered route when the quarterback senses an incoming blitz; that takes on-field repetitions more than anything, an opportunity not afforded one of college football's least-experienced starting lineups.
The Nittany Lions had one returning starter on the offensive line, not to mention minimal depth from tackle to tackle. Of the team's top four receivers, three were freshmen. The running game was nonexistent; pass protection was worse.
Penn State averaged 106.92 yards rushing per game, 120th in the 128-team Football Bowl Subdivision, and just 2.94 yards per carry, good for 125th. The offensive line surrendered 44 sacks, the third most in the nation.
In comparison to many of his teammates on the offensive side, Hackenberg was a veteran. That left Hackenberg occupying strange roles: that of a clear leader without the experience needed to carry the heavy mantle and that of a starting quarterback carrying an excessively heavy burden at an early stage in his career.
"Because of how people view Christian, he was supposed to be the guy," Franklin said. "There was no one to share that responsibility with him in the huddle, really. They're all looking to him, you're talking a 19-year-old guy, and the guys that are looking at him not only lack experience but are young. We talked about it. I don't think, I know that was an issue.
"That's how I saw it all along, and I was probably frustrated and defensive of him. Because again, he's 19 years old, had so much on his plate without the consistent running game and the consistent protection."
This demand taxed Hackenberg even more than the changes to Penn State's offensive system. Franklin's method wasn't drastically different than the system in place during Hackenberg's freshman season, if more rooted in overall concepts than O'Brien's scheme.
"If I'm frustrated, I don't like to show it," Hackenberg said. "The only way I can is by isolating myself. I kind of bottle it up. I never fully unleash it. That's kind of something I took from last year and I think I can grow from. Looking back at it, felt like I could've handled things differently."
Add it up — an inexperienced supporting cast, his own relative lack of experience, the coaching change, immensely outsized expectations — to draw simple conclusions: Of course Hackenberg struggled, and of course he was frustrated.
"He went through his whole growing-pains stage," Penn State wide receiver DaeSean Hamilton said. "He started off hot his freshman year, things like that. Then sophomore year, people had their eyes out for him, he wore a bull's-eye for a lot of people."
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There's playing quarterback, period, and then there's playing quarterback at Penn State; at the latter, Hackenberg said, "You're kind of in a fishbowl."
A year ago, the interest was magnified by the notice paid to Hackenberg's developing-on-the-fly relationship with Franklin, who had successfully turned around Vanderbilt's woebegone program during a three-year stint yet who lacked O'Brien's reputation as a quarterback guru.
Exacerbating the attention was the up-and-down nature of Penn State's season, which began with four wins in a row before continuing with four matching defeats, the program's longest losing streak in a decade.
"It was a trying year at times," Donovan said. "We had some highs, but we had some lows. In the end, we've got to fight through adversity. It's only going to help you as you go on. Football's a tough sport. Life's tough."
Even as the Nittany Lions secured a bowl berth in November, Hackenberg's own statistical downturn, in conjunction with a six-win regular season, raised questions about his future with the program — whether he would transfer, opting for a change in scenery to rejuvenate his promising career.
He heard the chatter, Hackenberg admitted, from fans, from students, from the media.
"You get the questions after the game," he said. "'Do you like your coaches?' It's like, what do you mean? Sometimes people interpret it as, 'Does he like him?' Of course I like him. I like him because their best interest is to win football games and our best interest is to win football games too.
"You're not always going to be buddy-buddy with your boss, but you guys will always have the same goal in mind. So you're always going to work together in every way that you can. These guys have been awesome. There's really no animosity at all."
The big takeaway: Ignore the noise, stay off social media, and rely on those you trust.
"I learned that you have to focus on what's inside. Your teammates, your coaches, your family, that inner circle. That's who I relied on throughout that. They know where my mind's at. They know what I want to accomplish here individually and what we want to accomplish as a unit."
In the long run, Franklin said, last year's struggles will yield a brighter future.
"The adversity he went through last year mentally and physically is going to help him. I mean, he showed everybody that he's a tough guy. A really, really tough guy."
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Off the field, the program has been rolling since Franklin first stepped on campus: Penn State has excelled on the recruiting trail, replenishing its ranks with two successful classes, and experienced a run of positive news in regards to its damaging NCAA sanctions — first with a reversal of a bowl ban and then a reinstatement of docked scholarships.
On the field, meanwhile, the Nittany Lions' turn toward positivity began during preparations for a Pinstripe Bowl matchup with Boston College last December.
The team spent more time self-scouting — reviewing film of its own performance — than focusing on the Eagles. That helped the team cement an identity, offensive lineman Angelo Mangiro said, while also allowing Hackenberg and the entire offense to acknowledge a crucial fact: It's no longer on the coaches or the scheme, but on us.
Against Boston College, the Nittany Lions scored a 31-30 win, the team's most points in a game since September, while Hackenberg completed 34-of-50 attempts for 371 yards and four touchdowns. It was a turning point, he said.
When the offense retook the field during the spring, players were no longer waiting a beat before exiting the huddle, taking a moment to review the formation, the play call and their respective responsibilities. Players were running to the line, said Mangiro; skill players were rolling, Hamilton said — and they looked like an NFL team, he added.
"We all treat each other like veterans now," said Hamilton. "Like seasoned veterans, in fact. We went through a whole season, including a bowl game, and not many young kids get to play in bowl games right when they get to college. We've seen it all, just like the entire team has seen it all. We've got to hold ourselves to another standard."
It's not even the same team, Franklin said.
Yet it is largely the same team — or roughly the same offense, at least: Penn State returns nine starters on the offensive end of the ball, with many still underclassmen with two or more seasons of remaining eligibility.
"We're going to get better and better every day," Donovan said. "We'll be better this year because of the experience."
So what happened to Penn State's quarterback, its future star? He still has the size, the arm strength, the balance and the brains, said Donovan; Hackenberg still has "everything you'd want to work with."
One year after a rocky beginning to a new coaching regime, however, Hackenberg can potentially add to those physical gifts a newfound ability to brush aside any pressure — on the field and off — along with a supporting cast better prepared to help shoulder the load.
With that, perhaps, will come an ability to not just weather adversity but embrace it, riding a competitive streak through a season's worth of unavoidable peaks and valleys.
"I'm not going to say it'll be night and day, because things don't really work like that," he said. "You're not going to go from 7-6 to whatever. We might — not going to say we won't. But it's going to be a process. There's always bumps in the road. I think we're in a position where if things work out we can be pretty successful."
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