Rain at Penn State forecasted - perhaps a deluge

ALTOONA, Pa.  -- The word is this: A 90 percent chance of rain this afternoon at Penn State, and an 80 percent chance tonight.

It could add up to an inch of rain total. It could be heavy rain at times.

Penn State's Beaver Stadium has a natural grass field.

What will it mean if the rain lives up to these dire forecasts? Well, let's start with the important stuff: The Whiteout.

A downpour will wreck the Whiteout. There's no way 110,000 fans have white raincoats. Sure, the Nittany Lion people can try putting white things on top of their wet-weather attire. Not the same.

And if they just go ahead and wear white, it would be more of a Drowned Rat Out. Not to call the good people of Happy Valley rats. It's just an expression.

But you know the deal. Raincoats aren't white. They're either dark, or yellow, or orange. The same with umbrellas. How many plain white umbrellas are there? Darn few, I'd say. They're colorful and striped and this and that. They are not white!

So rain would wash out a lot of Whiteout, which would dampen some of the Penn State spirit. Some, but probably not much. Maybe not at all. It might even have a reverse effect and make them more rabid for revenge on the Hawkeyes.

That frigid wind that gusted through Kinnick Stadium on a certain Saturday last November should have sent thousands of Iowa fans to their RVs, but nooooo, the fans stuck it out and only got louder as the day got rawer. They were there for their Hawkeyes in the fourth quarter, much like their team was there for them.

More practically, what would a hard rain mean to the game? Dunno.

I already thought the winning team would be the one that most successfully established the run. Now the teams will have to establish it -- possibly, I should say, I'm not Al Roker or Joe Winters -- in the slop.

However, it's a myth that teams can't pass in wet conditions. If anything, quarterbacks and receivers get a little bit of an edge over defenses with short and intermediate stuff in a rain game. If, that is, the QB and WRs and tight ends are sharp.

This is a long-winded way of saying I have no idea. Football is an outdoors game in the Big Ten, but the number of games played in foul conditions is actually very few. The weather Penn State and Iowa played in last November in Iowa City was an aberration. It worked against Penn State. Quarterback Daryll Clark hated it, and it showed in his accuracy.

Will Iowa's Ricky Stanzi shake off the slippery stuff if he has to fend it off on top of a hungry Penn State defense? That's kind of a good question, isn't it?

Heck, the rain may turn out to be a drizzle if that. But if it comes down and comes down hard, there will be one winner for sure. And that's ABC. If you're like me, you love watching football played in bad conditions - snow, rain, ice and vicious cold.

But let's hope the conditions are playable enough to establish if one or both of these teams are truly very good, or not. Because games like these on stages like these don't come around all that often at a place like Iowa, and it would be a shame if the weather was the story instead of the football.