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Penn State stunned college football world in poaching Jim Knowles from Ohio State. With Oregon looming, it's time to find out if it'll pay off

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — If he wants to, Jim Knowles can swivel around in his chair, look through the window from his new office within Penn State’s football facility and see, before him, one of his most cherished sights: acres of green grass.

If he slides open the door to his balcony, he can even smell that grass, especially after a fresh mowing (that’s the best time, he says).

Isn’t there a smell, a fragrance, a whiff of something that sends every person into nostalgia? Mom’s spaghetti sauce or dad’s barbecue; pencil shavings, Crayola crayons or the leather from a new baseball glove.

For Knowles — the 60-year-old defensive coordinator here, an Ivy League-educated man and, once upon a time, a boy from the inner city of Philadelphia — that smell is grass.

It reminds him of back home. He grew up as the son of a city cop in a small row house along Rosalie Street — a concrete jungle where nary a blade of grass existed. His first smell of grass came on a football field after his father enrolled him in little league ball.

Perhaps grass is symbolic for Knowles family. It represents something — the riches of his current life as the top-paid coordinator in college football, presiding over one of the country’s most talented rosters — a long way from that Philly kid who ditched a Wall Street job in the late 1980s for a $3,000-a-year coaching gig at his alma mater, Cornell, where he slept in the team’s locker room.

“I remember that year I was out of football, I’d go by practice fields because I would want to smell the field,” he said.

Nearly 40 years later, Knowles now makes $3 million a year, represents the most jarring assistant coaching move of the offseason (from one Big Ten powerhouse, Ohio State, to another) and is one of the more unusual characters in the entire industry — a graybearded, deep-thinking academic by nature who finds himself at the top of a profession of grunting jocks.

“He looks and talks more like a college professor than a football coach,” said Joe Bob Clements, a former assistant under Knowles at Oklahoma State.

For Professor Knowles, this Saturday night is the first big test in his new job.

James Franklin, Jim Knowles and the Penn State Nittany Lions will have their hands full Saturday against Oregon. (Taylor Wilhelm/Yahoo Sports)

Sixth-ranked Oregon, its bullish young head coach, fancy Nike uniforms and explosive offense arrives in Happy Valley for a titanic showdown against No. 3 Penn State. The game serves both as the first power conference competition for the Nittany Lions — the trendy preseason national championship pick — and a reintroduction of Knowles to a football world that last saw him in scarlet and gray.

But why, now, is he in navy blue and white?

Why would he leave Columbus for the same position within the same conference? There’s more to the story than just a contract snafu with the Buckeyes, he says.

How Penn State lured him from a Big Ten rival

“I went to Ohio State to have great talent, wanted to be the No. 1 defense in the country and win a national championship. There’s that feeling of accomplishment — job done,” he said. “Got an amazing offer from Penn State and Ohio State doesn’t match it. I didn’t take it right away. But I was like, ‘OK, I guess I need to think about this.’ Ohio State asked me not to go to [the national championship] parade. It’s kind of like … you’re like, ‘OK, I guess I’m supposed to go somewhere else.’”

He ended up back home.

As a child, his family’s resources didn’t allow him to attend any Penn State games. The family rarely, if ever, had enough money to leave the city. “Coming to a Penn State game,” he says, “that would have been like going to another country.”

But Knowles admired this place from afar since the early days of Joe Paterno. In the Catholic community of northeast Philadelphia, folks were fans of Notre Dame or Penn State. He even recalls each Sunday morning watching an hour-long recap show of the previous Nittany Lions game hosted by Paterno’s brother, George.

Joe Paterno’s mission — excellent academics and superior athletics — spoke to Knowles in a deeper way than most boys. After all, Catholic nuns deemed little Jimmy Knowles smart enough that he earned a partial scholarship into Philadelphia’s most prestigious academic high school, St. Joseph’s Preparatory, known in the city as The Prep.

His mom, raising three young children at home, returned to work as a secretary to afford the remaining portion of tuition. The family’s income was only enough to afford one car — a reason that neighbors often drove Jimmy to football practice. So excited to get to football, he ate his early dinners while dressed in full pads, raced out of the door as soon as he finished and jumped into a station wagon to head to evening little league drills.

Neither of his parents held a college degree. In fact, his mother didn’t finish high school. For that reason, they emphasized academics with their middle child. And so did all of his dad’s friends.

“The maintenance men and the firemen and the cops, they knew I cared about football and would do anything to play, so they’d say, ‘We go to your school and check with the nuns! If you’re not getting A's and B's, we’re not going to let you play!’” Knowles said.

Years later, when he got old enough to drink beers with his dad’s buddies, they revealed the truth: They never did any of that.

Jimmy sat flabbergasted. In retrospect, he’s glad they lied to him. “That drove me to do really well in school and that lasted my whole life,” he said.

When he graduated from Cornell, he went directly into the financial world, bouncing around from Boston to New York. He missed football so much that he’d watch New Jersey and New York high school football practices peering from behind a fence or in the stands.

Months into his job, he had a “premonition,” he says.

“I legitimately had a dream that I turned 30 and some kind of football job came open, and they couldn’t hire me because I didn’t have the experience. But I couldn’t go either because I had a wife and kids,” he says.

Knowles wasn’t afforded the ability to start at the top of the sport like some coaches. He slept in a cot in the Cornell locker room and then, in an upgrade, moved into another assistant coach’s basement. In this journeyman-like route, he didn’t get his first power conference coordinator job until he was 45. That began an eight-year stretch working for David Cutcliffe at Duke, before moving on to Oklahoma State and then, in 2022, Ohio State.

He’s been the architect of some of the most transformational turnarounds in the last two decades of the sport, taking the Blue Devils from the 108th-ranked defense to 21st in his final season as coordinator, from 112th at Oklahoma State to fourth and from 59th at Ohio State to first during last season’s national championship run.

How does he do it? Those who have coached for or with him share his secret. He uses an unconventional teaching method by staging game-show competitions among defensive position groups. Standing at the front of the room, players are required to answer questions against a timer as if they are guests of games shows like "Jeopardy," "Cash Cab" and "$100,000 Pyramid." Coaching staff members keep points based on accurate answers, and Knowles often takes the winning position group to dinner.

“He thinks outside of the box,” said Clayton Carlin, a defensive staff member at Louisiana who’s worked under Knowles and grew up with him in Philadelphia. In fact, the two were high school teammates — Carlin a running back and Knowles a linebacker. They butted heads, quite literally.

To this day, they remain close friends.

“That’s one of his many talents as a coach: He adapts his style to his players,” Carlin says. “He’s not one of those guys, ‘This is what we’re running and that’s it!’ The way he teaches in the classroom, he’s very creative and receptive to how kids learn these days. The days of standing up there lecturing for 30 minutes is over. He does things differently.”

Timers, buzzers, points, bells, powerpoint slides — Knowles’ meetings are a bucket of fun.

“The first time he introduced it, everybody is looking around, ‘What the hell is this?’” said Clements. “After a couple of sessions, it was insane how much the kids got involved. It was an actual game show. We’d have Pictionary, too, where they’d draw certain things. It was all based on football knowledge.”

So, let’s get this straight: One of college football’s most elite defensive masterminds is a professor-like man who attended an Ivy League and uses game-show acts to teach players?

There’s something else, too.

“One of his secrets is he can see things your average coach can’t see,” Clements said.

Off the field, he’s got a penchant for speed, according to Cutcliffe. “He drives like a bat out of hell in Manhattan [New York City],” the former Ole Miss and Duke coach said with a laugh.

He recalls a northeastern recruiting trip the two took together.

While weaving through traffic in the Big Apple, Knowles turned to Cutcliffe, “Don’t worry, I do this all the time!”

“Well,” the coach shot back, “I’m a boy from rural Alabama. When I go to Manhattan, I’m in a cab!”

A mighty task ahead

This week, Cutcliffe says his old assistant has his “work cut out for him.” Just four teams have scored more points this season than the Ducks and quarterback Dante Moore. They’re averaging more than 500 yards a game and lead the nation in a stunning statistic: They are the only team in the country to have entered a red zone at least 20 times and scored points each time (16 touchdowns and four field goals).

Knowles has an assortment of tools. Defensive linemen Dani Dennis-Sutton and Zane Durant returned for another season instead of turning pro and there’s cornerback A.J. Harris from Georgia and linebacker Tony Rojas, too — all likely high draft picks and veteran players.

Their new coordinator took the unit out for dinner when he arrived in the spring, detailing his past and coaching journey to his point.

“He’s been counted out and he’s found his way to the top,” Durant said. “He talks about the things he didn’t have as a kid and how fortunate we are to have different things and don’t take it for granted.”

So far, in three games, the unit has allowed two touchdowns. That’s less impressive when considering the opponents: Nevada, FIU and Villanova.

It’s time now for the real test, his first in navy blue and white after shedding Ohio State colors in one of the most stunning assistant coach moves in recent college football history.

Knowles shrugs off the drama as he explains what happened in Columbus.

It wasn’t an easy decision. Late last season, he and his agent received a significant amount of interest from a handful of programs. In a move not unusual with the coaching cycle, they asked Ohio State officials for a new contract before the season ended. Nothing immediately came.

At that point, Knowles entered the coaching transfer portal. After the season, he flew to Oklahoma to visit with his fiancée, Andi, who lived there at the time (she’s now moved to State College).

He spent five days there weighing his options after a new contract offer came from Ohio State — one that was near but not as lucrative as what Penn State offered.

Should he go to Penn State, stay at Ohio State or go somewhere else? During that stretch of time, news of Knowles' fiancée's residence (Oklahoma) leaked onto internet message boards. Could Knowles move back to the state and coordinate the Sooners?

“That was real,” he acknowledged.

“You turn it over to the process and allow the process to show you where you’re supposed to be,” Knowles said. “Where can I be the most helpful? I’m 60. Where can I contribute the most? It led me in this direction.”

In a few months here, it’s lived up to expectations, he says. State College is a close-knit community and the Penn State staff is a tight one where collaboration and communication are encouraged from the man at the very top, head coach James Franklin.

He likes the staff, the players, the town and that office of his, of course.

If you don’t catch Knowles coaching or teaching football, he might be on the golf course or reading a book or, even more often, smoking a cigar.

On a recent Thursday, he peered out of his office window to that balcony of his.

Has he smoked any cigars out there?

“I heard a rumor we could smoke out there,” he said with a smile, “but I haven’t figured out if it’s legal or not.”

If things go right on Saturday, if the Nittany Lions finally win a big game — Franklin is 1-15 against top-five opponents as Penn State coach — maybe Knowles will step outside his office, light a stogie, sink into that adirondack chair and get a big ol' whiff of the green acres below.

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