There wasn't much to be said in the locker room after the Penn State football team's 20-13 loss to Purdue.

Senior quarterback Zack Mills, coming off of his best performance of the season, was too dejected to get up and give a speech.

And Penn State coach Joe Paterno spent no more than three minutes with his team, scared his emotions would give way to words he'd regret later -- so instead, he just let the players leave Beaver Stadium, not even requiring them to conduct post-game interviews.

"I want them to go home," Paterno said in his brief post-game press conference. "Get away from it all."

Fortunately, this is the team's bye week, with no game scheduled for Saturday, making this it the perfect time to get away from it all -- from football, from the Purdue game, from losing.

After Purdue, the team didn't reconvene until Sunday, when Paterno talked for about half an hour, and didn't start practicing again until Tuesday. The Lions expect to practice today and tomorrow, but to then be off for the rest of the weekend.

"[Yesterday, today and tomorrow] are gonna be tough days, but after that, the coaches said, get away for a couple of days, start over," senior fullback Paul Jefferson said. "It's good to have a break."

With the weekend off, players would be free to go home, literally escaping it all. The rest comes on the heels of four days of practice, the first of which brought out the side of Paterno that he has hardly been remiss in displaying over the past week.

"Coach was pretty fired up [Tuesday], more fired up than he's been in the past couple of weeks," Mills said. "He's running around, getting guys in drills, and keeping that intensity up. He's letting everyone know we can make another play or two and that's the difference between a win and a loss."

In a bye week, there's no opponent to prepare for, taking that pressure off of the team and allowing it to try out different plays and drills. And while the goals that have been set are simple things like minding details and tweaking problems, the object is still to keep the players ready for next week, when they will have Iowa to prepare for.

"We want to stay in shape, we don't want to step back," Jefferson said. "We go out and have tough practices ... play football and make something happen.

"There's just not that stress or worry or excitement about Saturday."

But though the team has to wait until Oct. 23 against Iowa to have a chance to snap its three-game losing streak, it couldn't be happier for the time to recollect itself after the loss that Jefferson said "took something out of the team."

"I think the bye week is a refocusing week," punter Jeremy Kapinos said. "It's an excellent time to be saying, 'Let's go, let's get back to the way Penn State should be.' A lot of us are saying, 'We're tired of this, let's get back.' "