It's not even the numbers found in losing scores or pathetic amounts of yards. It's the numbers away from the field that are becoming more troubling.

Numbers like attendance, which was sparse at 100,353 paid patrons for the Northwestern game.

And, apparently, numbers as in the number of trumpets heard from the north endzone whenever Penn State's offense took the field.

"Whenever our offense took a snap, you could hear Northwestern's band playing, and they only had like four people on the trumpet," Penn State cornerback Alan Zemaitis said.

Yes, it got that quiet Saturday in Beaver Stadium at times during Penn State's 14-7 loss to Northwestern -- mostly when the Nittany Lions' woeful offense took the field. Often, the attendees, who were announced at around 100,000, though it looked a heck of a lot closer to 90,000, seemed disinterested, at best, when the Lions had the ball.

"You could hear the defensive coordinator on their side calling out their plays; we could hear from our sideline," Zemaitis said. "It got dead out there when we had the ball -- that's not something I'm used to."

At worst, the fans booed, a common habit of the Blue and White faithful on gamedays lately.

The players, understandably, still declared their all-too-common chorus that "the fans are still behind us," but "we know they're frustrated."

However, it looks like there are fewer and fewer people staying behind the team. The attendance in the student section in particular was noticeably sparse when the two teams kicked off at noon.

While the student section has filled to near its capacity in each prior game, on Saturday there appeared to be several thousand empty seats in the sophomore/freshman section as well as the junior and senior sections.

Many of the students again voiced their displeasure with the team as it left the stadium through the south tunnel, according to two of the crowd's most notable targets this season, quarterback Zack Mills and kicker Robbie Gould.

"I got several nice words running into the tunnel after the game," Mills said.

Mills said this with a smirk, acknowledging that the words weren't, in fact, all that nice. It' no surprise Mills is doing all he can to take it in stride; the players have become the brunt of more criticism with each passing week.

"I think everyone has a solution," fullback Paul Jefferson said, explaining why the fans voice their frustrations. "All they know is that Penn State isn't winning. And that's very atypical ... so you can see why people are upset. Some people wait all year for this. This is their life."