By now, most Penn State fans have probably come up with a favorite adjective to describe the Nittany Lions offense.

Among the most popular are: confusing, mysterious, archaic, convoluted, predictable -- or, in other words, too many favorites to mention here.

But, if you're looking for something else to say besides "Put in Morelli," you can now characterize the offensive playcalling as slow and unwieldy, too.

Because it appears that Penn State added an additional layer of potential confusion to its sideline system on offense. Fearing that teams might be stealing the coach's hand signals on offense, the Lions now use a different system of getting the plays into the huddle, according to quarterbacks Zack Mills and Michael Robinson.

The revised method came a week after Ohio State defenders said the Lions offense is predictable and two weeks after Iowa defenders were calling out the offense's plays at the line of scrimmage.

The play calls on offense get from the coaches to the quarterback via another player as the messenger. The two quarterbacks said a player will get a call, run the play selection into the huddle and repeat to the quarterback.

This -- like every other aspect of the offense, it seems -- sometimes created confusion, however.

"A few times the plays come in a little late because we're running them in from the sideline," Mills said. "We were afraid teams were catching on to our signals. So we lose a few timeouts."

On at least two occasions during the Northwestern game, some confusion caused Penn State to take unnecessary time outs to avoid a delay of game penalty.

After one such time out taken in the third quarter, offensive assistant coaches Bill Kenney and Mike McQueary were seen arguing on the sideline until Penn State football coach Joe Paterno stepped in and calmed the two.

The exchange between McQueary and Kenney may have been particularly heated because the botched clock management came right after the Lions gained possession on the Northwestern 35 off of a mishandled punt.

The crowd certainly wasn't happy either, as boos rung throughout the sparsely populated stadium. Clearly it was not a good start to a potential scoring opportunity. And since the drive ended with a missed 31-yard field goal by Robbie Gould, perhaps the bumbled play calling was a sign of things to come.

"Its tough just because when you have a player running play in, you run risk them forgetting play, saying it wrong," Robinson said.

Mills didn't say what went wrong in particular on that play in the third quarter, but he did say that, even when the play got in and the ball was snapped on time, the new system presented problems.

"The biggest thing is then you're rushing to the line trying to get the play off and you have no time to read the defense," he said. "And that probably happened four or five times."

The play calling, which created a great deal of controversy during the 2003 season, would figure to be one of the many major concerns facing the team after the season.

"Maybe something has to change," Robinson said. "what? I don't know -- something we gotta go into the offseason and try to figure out."

But with two games left, fans might have to be satisfied with simply coming up with a few more choice words.