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One of the many things that make college football unique, among big-time American team sports, is the disparity of competition.
The Pittsburgh Steelers never — can never, will never — get as big a mismatch as Penn State-Eastern Illinois.
But Penn State can get a game with Eastern Illinois and the like, which is not unlike the Steelers playing the Central Penn Piranha or the Phillies playing the Barnstormers. Penn State can play two thirds of its games at home, and can pack its stadium with mostly uncritical fans.
Which is why Penn State was able to get to November 8-1, ranked 11th in the country, very much in the picture for a BCS Bowl and a Big Ten Conference championship despite its sizable limitations.
It's a nice luxury, to a point.
The point arrived Saturday.
The Iowa game, a 21-10 Penn State loss back in September, could be somewhat written off. It was early in the year. It was essentially decided by a blocked punt.
The Lions had apparently improved quite a bit since.
Afterward, Joe Paterno referred to Iowa as one of those games where either side could have won.
We just made a few mistakes on this particular day, JoePa said.
The mistakes obscured the fact that on the line of scrimmage, where football begins and ends, Iowa had pushed the Lions around pretty good.
Ohio State pushed the Lions around better.
The Buckeyes out-rushed Penn State 228-76. The Lions had just nine first downs, and two of those were via penalties.
Ohio State had the ball for nearly 10 more minutes, and killed the Lions in the kicking game.
Penn State has the better quarterback, but Daryll Clark, for all his positives, is on the verge of being remembered as a guy who couldn't win the big one.
That label isn't fair, of course. It almost never is. But it is fair to say Clark is a guy who thrives on rhythm, and Ohio State didn't let him find one. Neither did Iowa, last year and this year. Neither did USC in January.
In his biggest moments, Clark tends to look jumpy, almost frantic. You'd look that way, too, spending a day dodging bullets.
The comparison between Clark and Michael Robinson, Clark's mentor and the man who as much as anyone saved Penn State's program in the watershed 2005 season, is endlessly interesting.
Clark is by most conventional measures a better quarterback. Certainly he's a better, far more accurate passer.
But Robinson could do more with nothing. He could rule a game, impose his will on it, rise above a fierce battle by being fiercer.
Ohio State's QB, Terrelle Pryor, was the villain of Saturday's Happy Valley drama. As a quarterback he is, to be kind, a work in progress. His throwing mechanics at times seem woeful not just for a big-time passer but for a little kid throwing a ball to his dad in the backyard.
But Pryor showed some signs this week. He openly acknowledged, to the media that it's his job to lead the team in big games, and he had utterly failed to do that.
He coped to a minor injury, but also said they'd have to kill him to keep him off the field.
His overall game stats show you nothing, 8-for-17 passing for 125 yards, five rushes for 54.
But he hit a 62-yard touchdown pass. He fought his way through traffic for a 7-yard touchdown run.
Penn State mostly corralled him Saturday, kept him from running free on the edge. But the one time it utterly failed, Pryor rumbled 24 yards for a key third-down conversion.
"He was prepared," Ohio State coach Jim Tressel said of Pryor. He added that his quarterbacks coach, after a meeting Saturday morning, told Tressel, "Coach, T.P. is zoned in now."
"Then when we got into our final last meeting — we have more meetings — before we boarded the bus, you could tell he knew what was up."
Ohio State probably has more athletes than Penn State right now, but it's not a blowout. And the way Paterno and his staff appear to be recruiting, the gap may be getting even smaller.
But offensive lines take time. They require intelligence and cohesiveness and chemistry. Hard to know why they develop slowly here. But they do.
Hey, 10-2 or 9-3, and a bowl trip somewhere sunny, ain't chopped liver.
But the truth is, as well as the schedule has hidden it, this amounts to a rebuilding year in Happy Valley.
Mike Gross is assistant sports editor of the Sunday News. E-mail him at mgross@lnpnews.com.
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