‘Carl Nassib Week’ continues with ESPN College Football Awards honors

Oh, what a time to be Carl Nassib.

The hulking senior defensive end has had quite the week-and-a-half, making stops all over the country to accept the Rotary Lombardi Award for the nation’s best lineman or linebacker and the Ted Hendricks Award for the nation’s top defensive end (and the first Penn State player to achieve the honors). He topped the Big Ten’s annual list of accolades as the conference’s pick for the Nagurski-Wooden Defensive Player of the Year, was named a USA Today second-team All-American and a CBS Sports first-team All-American, and sent his mom to represent him as a finalist for the Burlsworth Trophy because he couldn’t possibly make it to that and the Nagurski Trophy (for the nation’s top defensive player) ceremony, for which he was a finalist, later that day.

The Carl Nassib Football Tour continued Thursday night, during which he attended the ESPN College Football Awards and was named to the Walter Camp first-team All-America list, the oldest of the national honors in the country, as well as finishing as one of three finalists for the Bednarik Award (Temple’s Tyler Matekevich took home the honors).

The beginninng of all of those trips, though, didn’t start on the runway at the University Park Airport. They didn’t start when, according to defensive coordinator Bob Shoop, Nassib approached him in January and urged the coach to make an investment in him. They didn’t start when Nassib sat in defensive line coach Sean Spencer’s office, close to tears, as Spencer told him to limit the celebration Nassib showed after getting his first-ever sack in Beaver Stadium.

“We got on him, the first time he had a sack in Beaver (Stadium),” Spencer said. “You know, he got up, he pounded his chest, he went like that (Spencer threw his arms out). And you talk to him, and you try to tell him, ‘Listen, man. Don’t do that. Don’t attract attention to yourself.’

“And he goes, ‘Coach, I got to explain something to you,’ and he literally was tearing up in my chair. And he goes, ‘I’ve waited my entire life to make a sack in that stadium, and hear that crowd cheer my name. And for that moment, it had nothing to do with just me. It had to do with me being here, I had that moment to find.’”

All the trips and handshakes and impressive meetings and accolades didn’t start with that sack, nor his second, third or national-best 15th and 1/2 that sealed a school record.

No, all of this, this “Carl Nassib Week” on a different channel and in a different state every night, and suits, and appearances and trophies, it started in the weight room, where Nassib had to build his body to obey the intensity inside his head.

He came in to the program, this lanky, big-eyed kid from West Chester as a walk-on. And in college football, that’s a scrub list. The non-blue-chip list of the sport’s non-blue-bloods.

The story of how Nassib put on several dozen pounds and worked his way up the roster is well-known now, but former Penn State coach Bill O’Brien shared an anecdote this week with KRIV-TV in Houston about a sobering, motivating chat he had with the defensive end.

“I can remember one story where he came in and I basically questioned (this is how smart I am), I questioned how important football was to him,” said O’Brien, according to station reporter Mark Berman. “He said to me, ‘Football is really important to me. I’m going to play pro football.’

“And I said to him, ‘Are you kidding me? You’re going to play pro football? You need to be concerned about playing at Penn State, forget pro football. He proved me wrong. He worked his butt off in the weight room, got stronger and got better and got bigger.”

O’Brien put Nassib on scholarship, during a trying time in Penn State’s history in which the NCAA sanctions allowed just 65 total scholarships on the roster.

“You had to really earn it, and he did,” O’Brien said, according to Berman. “Happy that he proved me wrong.”

Nassib told ESPN on Wednesday that the talk with O’Brien was “humbling” and “a turning point in his career.” He didn’t believe the coach, to start, and it motivated him to prove O’Brien wrong.

It’s become ever-clearer, through stories from Nassib’s friends and teammates (some “Nassib Stories” they can tell about the quirky, highly-intelligent, unapologetically himself defensive end, some they just laugh and swear they couldn’t possibly explain), coaches and the Twitter posts of random interactions those in the community have with him, that the senior deserves every accolade he’s gotten after the regular season drew to a close.

Some might say that his is a wild success story, improbable even, and that’s what makes it great.

But I think what makes it truly incredible is this nagging feeling I have that Nassib was here, on stages shaking hands and on fields wreaking havoc, this whole time, in his own head.

He just had to wait for the rest of him to catch up.

This story was originally published December 10, 2015 at 9:18 PM with the headline "‘Carl Nassib Week’ continues with ESPN College Football Awards honors."