Penn State sold just 3,500 tickets, far short of the allotment it had to buy, and the majority of the 46,817 in the Cotton Bowl were those who made the trek up I-45 from Houston to watch their Cougars fling the ball around a few more times.
The players decided that not playing was the wrong message, even at the end of a season in which it has been difficult to know the right message. What they got for their trouble was a sound 30-14 beating in a game that was never in doubt. It could have been worse, and the Lions - maybe for the first time this season - were spared further embarrassment when Houston missed a couple of field goals and dropped at least two interceptions that would have gone for touchdowns. As it was, it was bad enough.
"All the things you can do to lose a game, we did them today," interim head coach Tom Bradley said.
So that was how the 2011 season ended, as the minor-key prelude to a day on which five other bowl games, each more meaningful than this one, would be played. Penn State, which has known so many glorious January games, finished off the greatest era in its football history as a sideshow act that couldn't draw a crowd.
All of it is prelude, of course, and when Penn State next plays it is possible that the entire coaching staff will have been replaced, that a new athletic director will be in power, and that the new university president will be delivering the results of the school's internal investigation into what went wrong with the culture of the football program. You can toss in some NCAA sanctions as another possibility. All of that could happen before the start of the 2012 season, and, very probably, much of it will.
