FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- Thursday afternoon, after an intense morning of banging helmets in the south Florida sun, the Penn State football team got to kick back and hit the sands in Miami Beach in style at a party sponsored by the Orange Bowl.

The players took turns playing volleyball, jet-skiing, playing pool and generally relaxing, while pods of interested bikini-clad girls and traveling Penn State fans gawked from the periphery of the event.

Other than some questionable rapping by Tamba Hali and the presence of some autograph-seeking memorabilia dealers, the afternoon was a success for everyone but Deon Butler, who nearly re-enacted Robinson Crusoe.

Senior defensive end Matthew Rice had already questioned the jet-skiing abilities of some of his teammates earlier in the afternoon, saying, “You better trust yourself out there because there are some guys that don't know how to jet-ski,” but no one had more trouble than Butler, who, much to the glee of his teammates, almost ended up as a stowaway on an oil tanker.

“That was about the longest 20 minutes of my life,” said the redshirt freshman wideout.

The party started at 2, and, as the afternoon wore on and the players got more comfortable on the provided wave-runners, their guides began taking them further out into the ocean. This is when the problems began for Butler.

“They take us out real deep, and we are just going to race back so we can't even see the shore. We go out there and just as I'm turning around to race back to the shore, my engine shuts off,” Butler said. “Nobody could hear me yelling as they were racing past because those things are so loud.”

Thinking the other teammates that were in his group would come to his rescue, Butler sat on his machine and waited… and waited… and waited.

At first Butler stayed calm, but then the gravity of the situation began to sink in. Who wants to be remembered as the first player in Orange Bowl history to miss the game because of jet-ski complications?

“I didn't realize how far out I was until I saw my group continue to go in and they were disappearing from my view. So I turn back the other way and I see an oil tanker about 300 yards away, and I know those are always far out in the water,” Butler said. “I just realized how far out I was and no one can see me and there are no boats out or anything. I'm just sitting there and the waves are taking me farther and farther away from the shore, so I'm getting real scared.”

Unfortunately for Butler, his teammates weren't nearly as concerned -- in fact, no one seemed to notice.

“Lydell Sargeant was one of the guys in my group, a wide receiver, and I'm thinking, ‘Oh, he's going to send somebody out here for me,’ but he tells me they were looking for me on shore and thinking I got off early,” Butler said, playfully entertaining the idea that Sargeant was angling for more playing time. “He saw me out there! He might have tried to leave me out there to tell you the truth. I don't know about that kid.”

Nevertheless, Butler was still confident that someone in the next group of players to come out would come to his rescue. No such luck.

“I see the next jet-ski group come out so I'm thinking they are going to come out and get me and they turned and veered off and started playing tag on their jet-skis,” Butler said. “That's when I really lost hope. I almost cried, I really did.”

According to Butler, once he saw multiple jellyfish in the water he abandoned all hope of swimming to shore, but thankfully an unnamed vessel called the Coast Guard and asked it to come rescue Penn State's leading receiver.

“I didn't even want to know what else was under there so I didn't look anymore and finally like a yacht-type boat comes like 200 yards away,” Butler said. “They kept going but they called the U.S. rescue boat, which comes in from like the ocean somewhere, and they come out there, and they sit with me for like another 10 minutes while they call the jet-ski people and the jet-ski person has to come out there and get me.”

Butler has most likely taken some serious razzing from his teammates, but he said that is nothing compared to what the jet-ski guides would have gotten from Penn State coach Joe Paterno if Butler had been stranded much longer.

“He might have really just yelled at those jet-ski people,” Butler said. “Then of course he would have yelled at me. Like, ‘Why did you go out there so deep, knowing that you can't get back?’ He would have found some way to blame me for something.”

Maybe Butler is to blame, but maybe the Nittany Lions biggest home run threat just took the phrase, “go deep” to the extreme.

Still, quarterback Michael Robinson was unsympathetic.

Said Robinson yesterday, “Who can throw it that far?”