NOTRE DAME, Ind. -- Well, it was a darned fine thing Penn State's players weren't allowed to do any interviews this week. I mean, otherwise, this might have been really ugly, or at least really ugly as differentiated from a 41-17 loss to Notre Dame that merely exceeded the minimum daily adult requirement of ugly.

As it was, the Nittany Lions misread Joe Paterno's instructions anyway. In a fateful little fit of dyslexia, instead of following the wise old coach's directive to drop everything and get ready for Notre Dame, they got ready for Notre Dame, then dropped everything.

Jason Ganter dropped the snap on a field goal to end State's first possession.

Tony Hunt dropped what he was carrying when Irish safety Tom Zbikowski crashed into him near midfield, ending State's second possession.

Derrick Williams dropped the one really fine deep ball thrown by Anthony Morelli to start State's hopeless second half, and on the very next play, Morelli dropped the ball as he began running some kind of goofy option play. Zbikowski scooped that one up and returned it 25 yards for the Irish touchdown that made it 27-0.

Zbikowski, a professional heavyweight boxer in his spare time, thus registered another knockout.

Finally and fittingly, Penn State may have dropped right out of the national rankings after exposing itself and all of the difficulties expected for a team with only six players on the entire roster with as many as 10 career starts.

"That's what I expected out of our defense," Notre Dame coach Charlie Weis said flatly minutes after the fourth-ranked Irish went to 2-0. "We were playing against a team with one experienced offensive lineman, and with a quarterback that's relatively new. So you have to put some heat on him, and I think they did a really good job."

On the rare occasion's yesterday when Weis' demonstrably poised outfit tried to match the Lions drop-for-drop, Penn State's inordinate inexperience simply wouldn't allow it. When the Irish home opener was nothing more than a 6-0 affair that neither team had a handle on, the Lions punted from their own 39. Zbikowski dropped it at the Notre Dame 25 right at the feet of Penn State's Knowledge Timmons.

Last week against Akron, Penn State fans rediscovered the platitude expressed on the monument of Animal House's Faber College: Knowledge is good. This week, a little Knowledge was a dangerous thing, for when a free football fell at Timmons' feet yesterday, he expressed no apparent interest. The Irish recovered, and went on to score the game's next 21 points, not that it was critical or anything.

While wondering if perhaps his Lions were looking past the Irish to next week's hair pull with Youngstown State, Paterno will have plenty to repair. He'll have to overhaul some egos on a defense that went from ferocious to feeble, particularly on third down. He'll have to examine his callow quarterback for evidence of post-traumatic stress disorder. He might even have to contact Professor Vittorio Hosle, the preeminent European philosopher and international scholar now on the faculty at Notre Dame. Having mastered Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit in his youth, Professor Hosle is fluent in English, Italian, German, Norwegian, Russian, French, Spanish and a handful of other ancient and modern languages. Only a person of this kind of intellectual depth could hope to understand what is going on with Penn State's special teams.

Last week's debut performance in which the Lions botched two field goals couldn't even hint at the special teams depravity that was to be unleashed in Indiana.

Ganter's fumbles and Timmons' refusal to be interested in a botched punt established an embarrassing momentum that didn't exhaust itself until Penn State tried an onside kick in the final seconds and didn't boot it the required 10 yards. In between, Jeremy Kapinos thunked a 32-yard punt that helped the Irish gain the field position for the drive that made it 20-0, the punt return unit let Travis Thomas rumble 43 yards up the middle on a faked punt, place-kicker Kevin Kelly took a delay of game penalty on an extra point, and reacted indifferently in so many situations that speedster Derrick Williams was routinely kept inside his 20 on kick returns, something it should be nearly impossible for an opponent to do.

When you're doing all this in the presence of Brady Quinn, the supremely confident Irish quarterback who owns 30 school records, you're going to suffer. Quinn went 25 for 36 for 287 yards and three touchdowns against a young Lions secondary that obviously couldn't handle it.

"Brady Quinn is the same every week," Weis said. "He has a passion to be great, and he practices to win."

Penn State apparently practices to drop things.

"The idea was that this would be a good experience for our young guys," Paterno said after watching a nice little six-game winning streak dissolve into history, "and that no matter what happened, we'd be a better team for it.

"We're going to go home, keep our heads up, and keep our mouths shut."

Yeah, that worked.