Pass rusher Aaron Maybin has 12 sacks this year and was named first-team All-America, but he's not Penn State's toughest man.
Anthony Scirrotto has started 37 games at safety, hits like a battering ram, but he's a relative wimp.
Josh Gaines is a three-year standout at defensive end and checks in at 273 pounds, yet he's embarrassed to mention his aches and pains in the company of Penn State's true warhorse.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Tuesday, December 30, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 30 words Type of Material: Correction
College football: A column on Penn State Coach Joe Paterno in Sunday's sports section said Paterno's son Daniel was injured in a 1977 trampoline accident. The son's name is David.
"I sat out for an ankle injury for a few games," Gaines said. "It made me feel real soft."
The steeliest bag of nails on Penn State's roster doesn't top 6 feet or register 170 pounds.
He can't put a heavy shoulder to a blocking sled, as he once did, or bound easily off the ground after getting knocked down.
Joe Paterno, though, can still take a hit.
"He's a beast," Gaines remarked.
The Rose Bowl will be played Thursday on a field of 100 yards, but it was the few feet Paterno walked recently, without use of a cane, from a golf cart to an interview stand, two days after his 82nd birthday, before a practice at the Home Depot Center, that defined a program's resiliency.
You could not help but acknowledge, and admire, those steps.
They were taken a month after hip-replacement surgery to alleviate the considerable pain Paterno suffered this year while, paradoxically, enjoying a triumphant ride in his 43rd season as Penn State coach.
"It wasn't pleasant," he said of all he has endured.
There were times, earlier this decade, when it appeared Paterno's win-loss record might fail the annual physical and nudge him toward retirement's plank. Penn State went 26-33 in five seasons from 2000 through 2004.
Yet, the football came back, starting with an 11-1 season in 2005, followed by campaigns of 9-4, 9-4 and 11-1.
The question became: How long, literally, could Joe go?
In November 2006, at the end of a play that ended at the sideline, Wisconsin linebacker DeAndre Levy inadvertently plowed into Paterno's left leg, causing a tibial plateau fracture and two torn knee ligaments.
Surgery was required but, amazingly, retirement was not.
Then, last summer, Paterno aggravated his right leg during practice while demonstrating an onside-kick technique.
The pain, and Paterno's renowned stubbornness, never relented as Penn State ambled toward the Big Ten title with a coach trying to remain ambulatory.
Paterno ultimately succumbed to cane usage and could no longer coach from the field, yet his field of vision remained clear and cantankerous.
When reporters pressed Paterno on his physical condition at one point during the season, he lashed back, "Can't we talk about the football team and not me for crying out loud?"
Paterno admitted to taking pills to numb the pain of his injury.
His suffering did not go unnoticed.
Kids today may not have much in common with a coach who still favors handwritten letters over text messages and uses phrases like "tickled pink" and "for crying out loud."
But football players know what tough is.
They can relate to rehabilitation, painkillers and magnetic resonance imaging.
They've been in training rooms, had their ankles taped, had sutures removed.
"He's one of the toughest guys I have ever met," Scirrotto said of his coach. "I have seen him, we have all seen him, take some tough hits from some big guys. He is the type of guy that doesn't even want help getting up, no matter how old he is.
"It's amazing to see him bounce back, injury after injury."
Paterno's list of career accomplishments could line the Rose Parade route.
This is his 59th season at Penn State since becoming an assistant on Rip Engle's staff in 1950. Paterno is major college football's all-time leader in victories, with 383, and the only coach to have won the Rose, Fiesta, Orange, Sugar and Cotton bowls. He has produced five undefeated teams but only two national titles, in 1982 and '86, a fact that has had him clamoring for a playoff since . . . 1968.
Paterno, a Brown graduate, has famously said "success without honor is an unseasoned dish," yet college football is the only sport where success with honor can still leave you needing a palate cleanser.
His only other Rose Bowl team capped a 12-0 1994 season with a 38-20 win over Oregon.
Don't you remember? That was the year Nebraska won the national title.
"Yeah, that bothered me," Paterno recently chirped, "but what are we going to do about it, until we get a playoff?"
Paterno's 23-10-1 bowl record stands above all.
His most impressive achievement, though, might be his incomparable endurance.
You want staggering stats? Paterno was born in 1926, three years after USC defeated Penn State in the first Tournament of Roses game played at Rose Bowl Stadium.
He began coaching at Penn State as an assistant a year before USC Coach Pete Carroll was born.
Since he took the reigns from Engle in 1966, there have been 837 coaching changes in major college football.
Thursday's Rose Bowl will be Paterno's 666th game as a member of Penn State's football staff.
In 59 years, he has missed three games, for these three reasons:
