You begin, perhaps, by trying to convince them that a community’s restoration of principles and pride might actually be worth more in the grand scheme of things than the pursuit of a trophy. Or, as in the current case of Penn State, a hypothetical trip to the Taxslayer.com Gator Bowl.

“We did lose a couple of players, but the guys that stayed, we told them, ‘You’re going to be able to really do something really different here,’ ” Pitino said from his current perch in Louisville. “ ‘Every night you play, you’re going to be in what feels like a tournament game.’ And that I think is what Bill O’Brien can tell his players: every game is going to be your bowl game.”

Whether Penn State should be playing football next season on television, or at all, is another debatable matter but not the reality for O’Brien and his players any more than the guilty-as-charged evil of Jerry Sandusky and the alleged negligence of Paterno are their responsibility.

“You feel sorry for yourself and you say: Why are we being punished?” said Deron Feldhaus, one of the players who carried on with Pitino. “But my dad had played at Kentucky. I had also been redshirted my freshman year so I would have had to sit out a year had we transferred. And I also knew that by my senior year we would have a chance to play in the tournament again, so all of us in that class put a lot on that.”

O’Brien could be cutting and pasting to field a team next season but will no doubt be pitching a similar plan by next year to potential recruits: redshirt a year, help lead us back to bowl prominence by the time you’re a junior. The forecasts of a decade or more of football misery at Penn State may be overstating the case in a college sports culture that is primarily defined by continuous change.