There's a poster of Beaver Stadium leaning against a wall in Charlie Fisher's new office at the Lasch Building, waiting to be hung. It's an aerial shot of the stadium at night, packed to capacity, its floodlights aglitter, its upper decks teeming with fans.

The Beaver Stadium depicted in that image is a far cry from the one that Fisher used to visit in the late 1960s and early '70s, when his older brother was enrolled at Penn State and his family was attending games. "There were wooden bleachers back then," Fisher said. "That tells you how far back that goes. I can remember seeing Ted Kwalick and Dennis Onkotz and Jack Ham. One of my most vivid memories is of getting Gary Hayman's wristband. Gary Hayman wouldn't remember that, but I sure do. I was probably about 10 or 11 years old. It was after a game, and I thought that was the coolest thing in the world."

Fisher was born and raised in Allenwood, Pa., a small community located along the Susquehanna River, about 60 miles east of State College. His father worked at the federal prison there and did some farming, too. His brother graduated from Penn State in 1974. Charlie graduated from Warrior Run High School in '77, and then headed off to Springfield College in Massachusetts. He went on to enjoy a successful coaching career, with stops at Eastern Kentucky, Ole Miss, West Georgia, North Carolina State, Temple, Vanderbilt and Miami of Ohio. Along the way, he coached a number of players who went on to make a big impact in the NFL: Torry Holt, Koren Robinson and Jay Cutler.

And now he's returned home.

In February, Bill O'Brien announced that Penn State had made Fisher the final member of its new coaching staff. He'll be working with the quarterbacks, a group that this year will include returnees Matt McGloin, Rob Bolden and Paul Jones, as well as walk-on Shane McGregor and incoming freshman Steven Bench.

If watching games in Beaver Stadium was the coolest thing in the world to an 11-year-old kid, returning as a coach is right up there, too. Fisher's family ties to central Pennsylvania run deep. "My wife is from here. She went to Warrior Run High School," he said. "She's my high school sweetheart. Her family's all here, so this is home. When I had an opportunity to come back here and coach at Penn State, I can't tell you the excitement for all of us - my family, my mom. So this is a special time for me in my coaching career."

CF: Well, I had a connection to Coach O'Brien through Coach [Ted] Roof and Glenn Spencer, who's a very, very close friend of mine - co-defensive coordinator at Oklahoma State. They were helping me get my name in front of Coach O'Brien, and he did some research and the timing just worked out perfectly. I was able to get in front of him and secure the job. It's a true blessing for me. I've been very grateful, very humbled by the opportunity. Because in the coaching profession, you don't get a lot of opportunities to coach at a place you've dreamed of coaching all your life. For me, this is a special opportunity at a special university. Just an awesome football program that's got great tradition. I know that from growing up here. That's the deal. On Saturdays in the fall, everyone heads here. It's been a neat first month here, and I'm really excited as we move forward with the program.

CF: Ted was the coach at West Georgia ahead of me. Ted and Mac McWhorter both spent time at West Georgia just ahead of me. Ted and Glenn were teammates and college roommates, so I got to know Ted through him. I've coached against Ted. When he was at Duke, I was at Vanderbilt, so I've known him and [Penn State tight ends coach] John Strollo, who was at Springfield when I was a player. He was a graduate assistant at Springfield when I was playing in the fall of '80. So I've got some connection to the guys on the staff.

CF: We want to get to the point where we're consistently putting out quarterbacks who are playing at a high level each and every year. When I came here and Coach O'Brien and I talked, we felt like we can recruit elite quarterbacks here. Not to say they haven't had great quarterbacks here before, because they have. I think the big thing is that we have to consistently put out a high-level player who is going to be consistent, each and every Saturday, and be a tremendous leader for us, be a good decision-maker, be accurate with the football, protect the football and be able to make plays. You've got to be able to make plays at the position. As that guy goes, generally your team goes and certainly your offense. So that's certainly our vision.

We're excited to see this group. We have intentionally not tried to overdo watching tape of these guys. This is a new system, and it's going to be very interesting to see who grasps it mentally and who's able to run it. Every offense has its nuances, and this is obviously going to be different from others. So we're excited to see how this group of players does, because the players who we have here now are the ones we're going to play with. We've got Steven Bench coming in, but these guys who go through spring ball will have a leg up from learning the offense. So we've got to ID a quarterback out of this group who's going to be our guy.

CF: Well, that's it. Football is football in a sense. Coordinators may have a tweak on a play or they may like this play better than that one, but by and large, the game has its core set of plays that you run and the core set of passes that you throw, and then there are some things you mix in there. I think the big thing in this offense is that the quarterback has to be on top of his game mentally. He's got to be able to get us in good plays and out of bad ones. He's going to be challenged mentally, because it's a pure pro-style attack and he's got to be able to identify coverages, put us in a good play, be a good decision-maker, be accurate with the football and protect the ball and help us win. Don't do things to put us behind the chains. Keep us ahead of the chains, so to speak. So the first challenge is that they learn it mentally.

We want to see a guy continually get better through the spring and into fall camp, and we want to be able to identify that guy. By the time we get to game one, we want to have a guy. Not two or three guys - a guy, who has consistently proven that he can run this offense, make the correct decisions and give us the best opportunity to win.

CF: Not right now. Not unless, for some reason, that's the way it worked out. We want to identify a guy who has earned the opportunity to start and then give him the opportunity to keep that job. And he's got to do that by consistently playing every Saturday. If he doesn't, obviously then we would move to another guy. But our preference, as we sit here and speak today, is to try to find one guy. Now, we'll see how that works out. Every practice will tell us a little bit more about each guy.

CF: I think so. That's what we believe. You never know, but as we enter spring practice, we feel that McGloin and Bolden and Jones are going to get the bulk of the reps. And they've earned the opportunity to show us: Can they grasp what we're doing? Can they run this offense?

CF: Not too much, but Bolden was in our camp down at Vanderbilt, so I'm familiar with Rob. I saw Matt on tape at Vanderbilt, because I recruited Pennsylvania. I did not see Paul. I know Paul is a physical specimen. You look at him and it's not hard to see that he has physical tools. But I've not tried to get too many preconceived ideas about what they can't do. You can get a negative slant if you listen too much.

We're trying to look forward, not back. That's my preference. Let's move forward. And they know there are things they have to improve on. That's our job as coaches, to improve those. We know we've got to have a more consistent, effective, productive pass game. Penn State has always run the football, but we want to continue to improve our pass game, and they're at the core of that. They've got to make decisions and deliver the ball, and we've got to ID the guy who can do that.

CF: When you look at efficiency, that's a couple of things. No. 1, it's completions. It's completing the pass. That's one of the first steps in efficiency. To me, the other big, big stat is touchdowns-to-interceptions. You want to get that at a two-to-one ratio. So if I throw 20 touchdowns, I want to have 10 or less interceptions, and the lower the better. You want to get your completion percentage over 60 percent, get your two-to-one touchdown-interception ratio, and the other thing is to create explosive plays, move the ball down the field. When you play at this level, it's hard to drive the ball 80 or 90 yards every time you go out there. You've got to create some explosive plays. And that's our job as coaches, to develop some schemes that can unload some big plays for these guys.

CF: Based on this offense, which is a pro-style offense, and what we're asking the quarterback to do, you want to recruit a smart guy. You want to recruit a football junkie, a guy who loves football and is going to study the game. He's got to study the game and know what he's doing, and he's certainly got to have pro-style skills, so he's got to be able to throw the football.

That being said, if we were able to secure a tremendous athlete who's a dual-threat guy and can do both, nobody would ever pass on that guy. We want the best player we can get at the position. But we know for sure that we want to have a guy who can make all the throws, certainly has pro-style size. We'd like a big kid. But at the end of the day, when we get done recruiting, we're going to recruit the best player who fits our scheme. If he deviates from that scheme, then we would have to have a good reason to take him. And those guys are out there. Robert Griffin is a great example. He's a dual-threat guy who really developed as a passer, and look what he accomplished. So we'll find the right guy for us. We will never be in a hurry to recruit a quarterback. We're going to make sure we do a thorough evaluation and find the right guy for us and the right guy for Penn State.

CF: I've got western Pa. - the Beaver Valley, out Route 80 and down into Indiana, that little nook. North Allegheny, not all of Allegheny County, but the north side of Pittsburgh. And then I go over into eastern Ohio, through that middle band there with a heavy concentration in Youngstown, Kent, Akron. There are a lot of good players in eastern Ohio. Penn State has gotten some in the past, so we want to get in there.

Penn State football is a tremendous brand, so we feel like when we go out there to recruit a young man, we have a great university and a great program to offer up.

CF: Can't wait. We have put tons of time in in the meeting room learning Coach O'Brien's offense. But again, football is football. A lot of the differences are in the language and how you get to certain things. One thing that we're not going to deviate from is that we're going to be a physical, hard-nosed team that can run the ball. We have a tremendous opportunity using the play-action pass game to make some explosive plays down the field. And we want to be as quarterback-friendly as we can be, give the quarterback the tools to be efficient. You've got to be able to extend the play at this level. There are going to be times when the play breaks down, and he's got to be able to extend the play and make some plays outside the pocket.

CF: Oh yeah, you can't help but drive by that stadium and let your mind wander a little bit. But we know there's a lot of work to do before opening day. As a coach, you try to keep your focus on what's next. And what's next for us is 15 days of practice here in the spring. We're really going to concentrate on putting our offense in, seeing who can execute and just raising the level of efficiency in our offense so we can identify who our starters are, who are the guys who are ascending in this scheme. And then we'll have a pretty good idea going into camp what they can and cannot do. And then in camp we'll build on that.

CF: I think it's always best if that's the case, if you can look at it and say, here's our guy. That's not always the case, though, when there's an open competition. Can 15 days ID a guy? It depends. If he plays well enough, it certainly can. But if one of them doesn't ascend and they play on a roller coaster - and that happens in a new offense - it might take us a scrimmage into the fall camp. And that's OK. We're not playing Ohio University on day three of spring ball. So you take it one day at a time and you see how that kid continually improves.

The summer is a huge opportunity for those guys to improve. It used to be, years ago, guys would go home for the summer. Then they'd come back and you would see who's in shape. That's not the case anymore. Now these guys train all summer, so a player can make tremendous strides, particularly learning a new offense. It's hard to get it all in 15 days. So there will be plenty of opportunities to improve between now and opening day.