Late Friday afternoon inside the Lasch Football Building, Joe Paterno gathered players for a routine squad meeting during which the coach normally talks about the plan for the next day's game.
This time, though, his message wasn't so normal.
"Austin [Scott] got himself into a little bit of a jam last night and he won't be playing in the game tomorrow," senior captain Terrell Golden recalled Paterno saying Friday.
"He didn't really go into detail," Golden said. "He just let us know that Austin wasn't going to be with us."
Scott's situation wasn't any clearer after the game. Paterno didn't address it in the locker room, Golden said, even though Scott's space had been cleaned out.
When asked in a postgame press conference if Scott was no longer with the team, Paterno wouldn't say, only offering that the fifth-year senior running back did not play against Iowa because he had broken an unspecified team rule.
Pressed further, Paterno said, "His status is very much in doubt as far as playing."
The vague explanation was all that many of Scott's teammates knew as well, even as kickoff neared. And the uneasiness of the situation seeped into the minds of the players during the game when it could have been avoided with a clear-cut explanation.
"It's definitely weird," Golden said. "It kind of carries with you [into the game]."
Without an account from any authority figure on the team as to why Scott wasn't in Beaver Stadium, the coaching staff risked filling the players' heads with in-game thoughts other than Xs and Os.
"We don't really know what's going on with that. Nobody really knows the story," offensive lineman Mike Lucian said of Scott's status. "We just showed up for squad and [Paterno] said, 'We're not going to have Austin,' and that was it."
Yesterday, JoAnn Scott, Austin's mother, peeled a layer off the mystery.
She said her son is off the team, and that he left State College for home Friday night and watched the game Saturday with a couple of friends. He was heading back to campus yesterday for classes this week.
Still, she wasn't able to divulge specifics as to why or how Austin had been kicked off the team.
"Until we get all the facts straight, I don't want to comment," JoAnn Scott said.
She shouldn't be expected to comment. But why not Paterno? Why not stand up for your player, or at least explain why you're not?
After Saturday's game, several teammates didn't know if Scott, who had been splitting carries with fellow senior Rodney Kinlaw and redshirt freshman Evan Royster at running back, had been dismissed from the team or not.
"I have no idea," linebacker Josh Hull said, echoing similar statements from a few players.
But one agreeable point among them was that it was strange practicing with Scott all week to then have him suddenly disappear inexplicably when game time rolled around.
Had Iowa been a semi-decent team and won Saturday's game, there would be a built-in excuse that not fully addressing the team of Scott's situation affected the Nittany Lions' play. It seemed to affect the team to some degree.
It was hard, wideout Jordan Norwood said, to leave speculation and inference off the field.
"He's a friend to all of us, and we wish he was out there with us, but at the same time we need to be ready to play," Norwood said.
That wasn't easy for some that are still waiting for an explanation.
