This was Bob Spoo on Saturday, the old coach talking outside the locker room about the spirit of his defeated players after getting trounced by the older coach and his bigger and better players.

"I'm not sure. I didn't get after them," Spoo said, almost helplessly. "I thanked them for hanging in there and finishing it and not giving up, and let's get ready for next week, back to conference."

Such is the predicament the 71-year-old is left in after Eastern Illinois accepted nearly a half-million bucks to lose by a margin of nearly a half-century.

Roughly 10 grand for every point Penn State scored, give or take.

That's what Spoo will take with him back to Charleston, Ill., along with a group of guinea pigs now well tested in the heavyweights' grand experiment to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, at least in spirit.

Laugh with the sinners or cry with the saints, good ole Billy Joel once said.

Daryll Clark and Jared Odrick, two bigger pawns for a much bigger operation within the system, were each dancing on the sidelines in the closing minutes Saturday, nearly 15 minutes of rest under their tired legs after another hard day of work in the final seasons of their careers, the kids' last opportunities to seize before their futures will be decided.

"Until you see a guy like Odrick in person, you don't really know until you've seen someone that big before," Eastern Illinois quarterback Jake Christensen would later say, answering a question about his team's readiness for this game. "You don't know what it's like. You just really don't."

But on his sideline, Christensen and his teammates were far from broken, refusing to play their role in what has become a mockery of a system.

They jumped for joy in the closing minutes, encouraging a reserve sophomore named Nick Martinez to keep his head up after he nearly intercepted a pass by Penn State third-stringerMatt McGloin near their sideline but came up empty-handed.

The Panthers gathered in a circle with 2:50 left, the offense going in for what should have been the merciful end to a crushing game.

"One-two-three!" they all shouted. "Finish!"

They gathered in another circle a few minutes later, their fates officially sealed and that check officially in their hierarchy's hands, and they said a team prayer.

They finished the prayer and they ran over to Beaver Stadium's northeast corner, where they sang the school fight song and thanked their dozens of fans who had spent the last three hours no worse off than their favorite team.

They then trotted toward their locker room in the northwest corner, where some of them even got a congratulatory high-five or a "good game" from appreciative Lion fans.

Back outside the locker room, Spoo and Christensen talked about these kinds of matchups, the kind people only watch with the hope that another Appalachian State-Michigan-like upset might happen, or at least with the hope that another Northern Iowa can hang with another Iowa or another Jacksonville State can hang with another Florida State.

Never mind that Spoo said his team is "not even close" to Appalachian State, making such an upset as likely as Penn State hiring a special teams coach one of these days.

"If the FCS teams keep playing with FBS -- gee, there's too many 'Fs' and 'Cs' and 'Bs,' " joked a tongue-twisted Christensen, now doing his best Joe Paterno impersonation. "If the I-AA teams keep playing with the DI teams, I don't know how you can stop it. Because the more competitive it is, there's no good argument for me to cite at this point."

And you better believe all hope for a change will be lost should Boise State run the table and stick its nose into the BCS title game this year, because it's just one more argument the have-nots won't have in their fight against the system.

"We've got a lot of work to do," Spoo said. "We're glad to be going back to Championship Subdivision Football. Is that what they call it now?"

Sure, Coach, though beggar is just as appropriate