With the cold rain pouring down from overhead, Joe Paterno rushed into the Beaver Stadium media room. The ringleader of the three-ring circus that is Penn State's annual spring intrasquad scrimmage had a special announcement to make.

The press box, he said to a throng of reporters, was off limits for the day, and the media would have to sit outside.

Penn State's head coach of 41 years was joking, of course, but the tone of the scrimmage had been set. Paterno knows better than anyone that the game, played without four returning starters, was meaningless, and -- in the grand scheme of things -- a joke.

Paterno, an English major at Brown, might prefer to think of it in Shakespearean terms.

The game crept at a petty pace -- to take a line from Macbeth -- and was full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

"Saturday," he said to his assistant coaches, "is show time, it ain't football time."

So the assistants ran the show, having Derrick Williams throw two passes as a quarterback. Safety Jason Ganter threw a pass after lining up in the offensive backfield. On one of the final plays, safety Darien Hardy took a hand-off as a running back.

The game clock (which was set for a 12-minute fourth quarter) didn't even stop after the game's final play, an incomplete pass that fell harmlessly to the ground with 11 seconds remaining.

"Joe probably had his hand on the clock up there," defensive coordinator Tom Bradley said.

The glorified scrimmage could not have ended soon enough. If it were up to Paterno, the day might have been used to practice something like special teams, an area, the coach admitted, that did not receive as much attention as it probably should have during spring drills.

While the players have almost four months until their next contact practice, the most important thing to Paterno and the rest of the coaches is that no one was injured, nothing was lost.

"The good thing is no one got hurt," Bradley said. "That, to me, is a good thing to take away from the spring game."

But what should the 18,000 die-hards in attendance take away from the scrimmage? What did those fans really see?

Anthony Morelli was good, but he was never under much pressure from the second-team defensive line. It would have been interesting to see him have to buy time in the pocket or do something with his feet.

"Anthony's a decent runner," Paterno said. "He's not a big fat kid running, he's no newspaper reporter. He's got some speed."

Tony Hunt averaged five yards on four carries, but never saw the field again after the Blue team's first possession.

Three of the four returning defensive starters didn't play.

"It's a game for the fans," starting linebacker Dan Connor said. "Practices are way more intense, and starters will get more time [in practice], but we look at this as a time to relax. It's the end of the spring, so go out there and bang each other up a little bit."

Paterno, though, has always said that when you take to the football field, one of two things can happen: either you get better or you get worse. But which one resulted from Saturday's scrimmage?