Certainties: death, taxes, Paterno

Witness the healing power of medicine. Give a guy a new hip, and he believes he can coach until he’s older than Moses.

Penn State said this week that Joe Paterno has re-upped through the 2011 season.

This is like extending the contract for Santa Claus, or announcing that Old Faithful will erupt for at least three more years.

The man has a career line that looks like Christopher Columbus’ sailing charts – from long to longer to off the map.

Ponder this a moment. If the Nittany Lions are good enough and the fates allow, Paterno will one day coach in a bowl game at the age of 85. It would be his 46th season at one job.

This scenario, by the way, is presented the same week that the number of NBA coaches fired hit six out of 30 teams, with the season barely a quarter finished. And the coaching changes in major college football reached 20 out of 119.

Guys in his profession are as disposable as razor blades.

So we should pause here and marvel at Paterno, as for any natural wonder. Not often it can be said that we are watching a man go where no one has gone before. Penn State and Star Trek.

Bobby Bowden is close. But he’s just a kid, at 79, and Florida State already has a successor in place.

Penn State will replace Paterno, too, one of these millenniums.

Maybe this would be a good time to put his longevity into some perspective. Pick up those soda bottles he uses for glasses and take a closer look.

Penn State has had one football coach since 1966. The rest of major college football has made 837 coaching moves – and counting.

Bob Stoops, the man who will coach Oklahoma in January’s national championship, was 6 years old in 1966.

Urban Meyer, the Florida coach who will oppose Stoops, was 2.

Barack Obama, the ninth U.S. president of the Paterno era, was 5.

Alaska and Hawaii had been states for seven years.

Florida State, where one day a man named Bobby Bowden would come and stay awhile, had been playing major college football for only 14 seasons.

Notre Dame was the national champion in Paterno’s first season. Ara Parseghian was the coach. He has now been retired for 35 years. The Irish have hired seven more coaches since.

If Paterno goes 46 seasons, by the way, his tenure will be as long as Rockne, Leahy, Parseghian and Holtz at Notre Dame all combined.

Paterno repeated a story not long ago at a press conference about what his father – who never owned a home – said upon hearing the news that young Joe wanted to be a football coach instead of a lawyer.

“For God’s sake, what did you go to college for?”

Angelo Paterno told his first born to at least try to have an impact on Penn State, “instead of teaching a bunch of guys how to knock each other’s brains out.”

Fast forward a half century or so. “I think I have made a little bit of an impact on this place,” Paterno said. ”I feel good about that.”

Most of the seniors he coached his first season are now in their 60s and thinking retirement.

Joe Paterno isn’t.