Joe Paterno can be so serious it's funny.

In his last Tuesday press conference, he actually used this line: "Some of the things we would do, I don't want to discuss publicly."

Are we talking about Iraq or something?

No, Joe's talking about which player he's going to move into the hero position, which has been decimated by injuries.

So we, the media, are left to speculate, and speculate we have.

Someday not so far down the line, Joe will go off on a diatribe about how the media speculates.

Go figure.

The Paterno image is an interesting thing. It is probably true that the very word, "Paterno" no longer signifies a 75-year-old, Italian-American man with coke-bottle classes.

No, Paterno means Penn State now. And it means integrity and class and academics before athletics and the good way of doing things. It is a whole bag of stuff that extends outward from the man.

Whether all of it is real or true doesn't seem to matter. What's done is done.

The fact is, Paterno often hides in the image other people gave him. Not that he can be blamed for doing so.

Here is a man that cannot walk through his own neighborhood without honks and shouts. Here is a man that cannot sit on his backyard porch without people coming over from Sunset Park to meet and greet.

It's tough to look at a life that has spanned so many years and seen so much. College football is a totally different game than it was when Paterno took the reins at Penn State in 1966 and that is because of people like Paterno.

This much must be understood about Paterno: He is intensely competitive, no matter what his humanistic, liberal arts, classical studies image tells you. A guy has to be to stick around in college football. The aggressive recruiting, the year-round concentration on football, the unfathomable scrutiny of game tapes, the constructing of large stadiums with loud hometown crowds that make it impossible for away teams to win -- all of it is because of Paterno and men like him.

But now every school does these things, from Central Florida to Nebraska, and they are no longer a huge advantage for Penn State.

So where does Paterno stand in the cutthroat world of college football he created?

It's hard to say.

There's a saying among those that follow Penn State that goes: "Joe's still trying to find a way to play the games without people knowing."

Or, more simply, he's trying to get back to days of yore.

Most schools allow reporters to watch practice and chat with players afterward. A relationship grows between the media and the players. Personalities emerge. All of it allows college football to take a human turn.

Also, reporters get an understanding of the technical side of a team, see what they are working on in practice and get to know the playing styles of each kid.

All of this is important because so many people care now. People want to know what's going on with their team and the competition. For sports fans, the best drama around is a bunch of kids trying to win a national title. They want to hear about a young kid trying to rise from obscurity to play hero at Penn State.

That's why schools invest so much money in it. It's marketable.

And there's nothing wrong with that. College football was made for fun. It's supposed to get people talking. It's supposed to create excitement.

Too often, Paterno acts as if 110,000 fans should show up on Saturday and then forget about Penn State football until the next Saturday.

Paterno is an interesting man. An interesting man that sometimes gets lost in all of this.

It says something about a man when he chooses to coach young men in a game for his whole life. It says a lot when a man goes through hardships like Paterno has recently and still shows up for the next day of work, as energetic at 75 as he was at 25.

Oh, to be a fly on the wall during Penn State's team meeting last Monday. Oh, to simply have Paterno explain what he said or how he felt.

We don't need a word-for-word transcript. But wouldn't it be interesting to hear about a man with so much experience trying to rally a group of kids who had just lost such a tough game? Wasn't what Paterno said probably a good lesson for all of us?

And besides, it's just football and there are more important things in life. The constructed image of Paterno extols that value, but the football coach often acts as though he forgets that throwing a pigskin around is all fun and games.

The image that others have built for Paterno is not wrong. He is a great man, but for entirely different and more realistic reasons.

He is not a saint. He grabs officials when he should not. He angers the young men who trust him. He makes bad decisions.

Joe Paterno is human, like us all, even though somewhere along the line somebody tried to make us believe otherwise.