COLLEGE FOOTBALL: THIS SEASON’S GRANDDADDY : Nittany Lions Are Outgrowled by Miami : Hurricanes Get Huffy at Pregame Dinner : FIESTA

Miami has gone off the deep end, which is not entirely unanticipated.

But who would have thought this soon? There are still three days to go until the Greatest Football Game of All Time and this team is already at such a battle pitch that Gen. Patton might have been cowed.

Never mind the combat fatigues, which the Miami players unveiled only as soon as they landed here. How about Sunday night’s Pearl Harbor dinner with the Penn State players? If these guys were wound any tighter, they’d be the size of golf balls.

You thought the game for No. 1 was going to be pretty? Well, Friday night’s Fiesta Bowl game between the two undefeateds might turn out, but the week before is shaping up like Apocalypse Now as played by the Three Stooges.

Let’s go to the Sunday night dinner, one of those fun events bowl people always mistakenly schedule as part of the festivities.

As part of the fun, the Penn State players conduct a little lampoon of the top-ranked but just as highly beleaguered Hurricanes. It is out of character for Penn State, agreed, but then anything short of a prayer meeting is figured out of character for St. Joe’s boys. Good clean fun, otherwise.

There’s a skit about Miami quarterback Vinny Testaverde winning the Heisman Trophy. The hilarity is undeserved, something about the Penn State trainer being the true model.

Then there was something about the so-called oneness of Miami, the black players get to eat at the training table once a week. The Hurricanes are not amused.

Then the capper. Penn State punter John Bruno crossed the bounds of good taste and made fun of Miami Coach Jimmy Johnson, something about his hair spray. To be fair, Johnson does look like a cross between Bob’s Big Boy and the Sta-Puft marshmallow man. His hair is magnificent. But who is to say how he does it?

Anyway, that was it. Jerome Brown, the fierce defensive tackle, looked across the table at his coach and exchanged a knowing glance. This was not good clean fun anymore.

As fellow defensive tackle Dan Sileo had said earlier, “We joke about everything, even make fun of Coach Johnson. Why, we have a guy who impersonates him perfectly.”

Makes fun of his hair?

“No, we know where to draw the line.”

So Brown, who was going to do a rap song, took the stage, stripped down to his battle fatigues and said: “We’re not here for you all to make monkeys of us, we’re here to make war.”

Then he added: “Did the Japanese sit down with Pearl Harbor before they bombed them. Let’s go.”

And with a sweep of his arm, Brown cleared the room of Miami players, also in their famous fatigues by now. Penn State was somewhat baffled, although Bruno did excuse them with panache. “They had a screening of Rambo to attend,” he explained. Then, coming back to the mike, he said, “Hey, didn’t the Japanese lose that one?”

Never mind, Miami is now where it most likes to be, in its bunker. Miami against the world, never mind Penn State. Even their coach, who has otherwise appeared a beacon of good reason and grooming, is sounding the same defensive-paranoid themes that have been his team’s rallying cry.

“It just so happens,” he explained Monday, in a voice that was only this short of trembling, “that I like to look neat.”

You want to say, take it easy, but it wouldn’t do any good. If it hadn’t been a hair spray joke, it would have been something else.

Miami, the season’s dominant team, thrives on a persecution complex. As they have taken criticism on a number of fronts, since the season began, the players have shown a unity that, in fact, is not a joke. Whether they are making headlines with a number of police actions--most minor, depending on your point of view--or football actions, they do stand together.

“All that rag-dog stuff you put in the papers, all that does is make us better,” explains Jerome Brown. “The press is actually helping us win the national championship.”

This attitude was acquired early. Back in September, when Miami played top-ranked Oklahoma in a game that largely determined the course of the season, the team was surrounded in ugly controversy. Near riots with campus police at the players’ dorm, the MCI credit card scam, an investigation into car leasing by some players, a shoplifting charge and still other incidents involving police--these had tended to put the program in a bad light. And put the players in a defensive stance.

“We’re on a mission,” said running back Alonzo Highsmith after the Oklahoma game.

Furthermore, he announced to the startled rag-dog press, anything that was written about them would only serve to fuel their drive. “We stand together,” he said.

The players continue to be mystified by the outlaw image that dogs them, although they are aware that playing in a big city is part of the problem and that talking big contributes some. “We’ve got the Miami Herald for what is essentially a college newspaper,” said Dan Sileo. On the other hand, Sileo admitted, “We do play up to it, I guess.”

In fact, both teams have embraced their opposite images with a gusto. Miami did little to disabuse anybody of the notion that it was Rogues a’Plenty when it chose to wear the fatigues coming off the plane. It was all anybody could talk about until Pearl Harbor. Penn State, meanwhile, started appearing for press conferences in blazers after the Brown bombing.

Penn State, which goes to some lengths to downplay the Goody Two-Shoes image that comes with all of Joe Paterno’s teams--Paterno is even talking up his rough and tumble characters--has nevertheless maintained a correctness in appearance and attitude that is somewhat maddening.

“No comment,” said Penn State guard Dan Morgan, when asked about Pearl Harbor.

Said defensive tackle Bob White of the dinner: “The food was good.”

Center Keith Radecic said the whole thing about the combat fatigues was kind of funny, but admitted that some of the Penn State linebackers were outraged. “But that’s linebackers,” Radecic added.

Even Paterno, sportsman of the year in the eyes of Sports Illustrated, remained unruffled. “I notice they didn’t leave until they had eaten,” he said. “Typical football players.”

Miami, however, continues to speak its collective mind, often outrageously. Never mind what they have been accused of doing. Just listen to some of the stuff they say to the rag-dog press:

“Outlaws?” said Brown. “We don’t care what people think of us. As long as we win, make our fans happy, we could care less what people think. We take an attitude, ‘We’re on a mission, Miami, and we’ll do anything to win.’ ”

Brown, who tried to intimidate Oklahoma players at the coin toss by refusing to shake their hands or speak, says all is fair in football. “If football is made for clean-cut guys, priests would be playing the game,” he explains. “It was made for men, trying to kill somebody.”

Brown teamed with Highsmith and the ultimate clean liver, the milk-drinking Vinny Testaverde, on the fatigues. The GI Joe look might not have passed with the pin-striped Johnson, although Johnson later said he wished he had thought of it himself. Brown said the idea was to instill yet more intensity in the team, although Brown himself voices no lack of it.

His brand of football, he says, is such that, “If it takes me to punch somebody’s eye out, I’ll do it. Only quarterback I won’t hit is Vinny. I’d lose my scholarship. Anyway, behind closed doors, Vinny is a normal guy.”

Mused Brown at one interview, “You know, I don’t think I’d have fit in at Penn State.”

Nor would have Sileo, who never hesitates to contribute to the Miami outlaw image. Sileo, a transfer from Maryland by way of Cincinnati, was barking before he ever won a starting position. He befuddled Oklahoma’s Brian Bosworth earlier in the season when he said Bosworth “couldn’t even make our team.”

Asked All-American Bosworth: “Who in the world is this guy?”

His teammates celebrated him for the bulletin board gaffe, but Sileo has yet to pipe down, especially since he has become a defensive mainstay. The other day, he was regaling the rag-dog press with stories of his days at Maryland, “where I’d drink a lot of courage and accidentally hit somebody on the way home.”

Those were the good old days.

“Oh, we’re characters, all right,” Sileo said. “We carry our field tactics off the field. I don’t think a lot of us would fit in at Penn State. Me? I’d have been kicked off the first semester. Anyway, I was not recruited heavily by Penn State. I guess I didn’t have a 5.0.”

These guys will pretty much say anything, much to the delight of the rag-dog press . And Johnson is not one to muzzle them. “If you lead them around, tell them what to do every day, how does that teach them responsibility?” he questioned.

Johnson boasts of the graduation rate at Miami, up to 74% for football players from a low of 9% in 1980, and of their involvement in charity causes. They’re good boys, he says.

“It’s just that they get offended when somebody makes light of their accomplishments, when people poke fun at their head football coach,” Johnson said. “It’s not fun. They don’t like to be ridiculed. It’s supposedly ha-ha funny-funny, but it’s not. This is a business trip for them.”

The stuff about police records? From a Penn State player?

“They’re just tired of it,” Johnson said. “All they get is criticism. They are just tired of hearing about it. And as a consequence, we have a oneness I’ve never seen before.”

Johnson, thus, hardly disapproved when his players walked from their fun fete at the Western steak fry. “They were ready to leave anyway,” he said. “They’re not big on country-western music.”

So Miami, which was merely good when it got to town, is now good and mad. That’s how Miami likes it, apparently. Wouldn’t have it any other way.

And let the next man who makes fun of Johnson’s hair be ready for war. Football won’t do at this point.