Beating Men at Their Own Game : Football: The wife of USC’s coach helps women understand the ins, ends and outs of the sport by teaching them some things even their menfolk may not know.

It was Thursday night football and Smith of USC was making the coaching calls. Cheryl Smith.

Some in the group had been lured by a newspaper ad: “Ladies . . . tired of not knowing the difference between a tight end and a free safety? Cheryl Smith, the woman behind USC head football coach Larry Smith, can help . . . .”

Now, 35 women had gathered in a room at Descanso Gardens in La Canada for “Football for Women,” session one of a four-evening clinic for which each had paid $75 to learn more about this peculiarly American pastime--college football.

Smith, a vivacious, silver-haired woman of fortysomething, set the tone. The idea, she said, was for the women to be able to tell their husbands and boyfriends and sons something about football that the men don’t know and “pretend that they do.”

She added conspiratorially, “It just blows them away.”

Pencils and note pads came out as Smith dispensed a few nuggets of football trivia:

* The first college football game was played Nov. 6, 1869, between Rutgers and Princeton. Neither team had uniforms, but Rutgers players wore scarlet stocking caps. Rutgers won, 6-4. “You’ll need to know,” Smith said.

* In the early years of the game, a down was five yards and failure to make the yardage in four attempts resulted in a 10-yard penalty. “Write this down,” Smith said, “because they don’t know this.”

She drew a rectangle on the chalkboard, dissected it with horizontal lines, then with vertical lines. Voila! A grid, as in gridiron. Smiles of comprehension brightened her students’ faces. She smiled. “I’ll bet they don’t know that, either.”

By evening’s end, these women would know the dimensions of a football field, the job description of the “three little men” in black-and-white striped shirts (the linesmen), the height of the goal posts and the width of the crossbars.

The women got a good look, close up, at a football. One raised her hand and asked, “Why do they have laces?” Probably to give the passer a better grip, Smith reasoned.

In future weeks, these women would learn about offense and defense and split ends and wishbones and options. But tonight’s session was an overview--a little football history, some football lore and a Smith anecdote or two.

She started these seminars 10 years ago in New Orleans, when her husband was head coach at Tulane, she explained, because women were always saying, “Well, we know your husband coaches on Saturday, but what does he do the rest of the week?” This is the first year she has offered them in the Los Angeles area.

Part of her goal, she said, was to present the “human side” of players and coaches. She explained that, on non-game days, there are films to be scrutinized--those of USC’s most recent game and those of the next opponent. There are player performances to be evaluated, practices and more practices. Off season, there are fund-raisers and recruiting.

“I’m going to tell you, coaches’ wives do not have to know how to cook,” Smith said, explaining that coaches rarely make it home for dinner.

When the Trojans travel, she goes, too. When there are Saturday home games, Coach Smith bunks Friday night with the team--Cheryl Smith calls the players “our kids”--and she doesn’t see him until after the game.

The women listened intently. Some have sons who are high school players. They had questions about letters of intent and eligibility rules and redshirting (the practice of letting a player play four years within five consecutive years, giving him his freshman year to mature physically and emotionally).

It was coffee-break time. Jeanette Nuss laid down her notebook and confided, “I know nothing about football, and my son (Chad) plays at Loyola High. Something defense. I only know his number.” Nuss said she goes to all his games but “I never know who has the ball. My husband refuses to sit next to me. He’ll say, ‘You’re cheering for the wrong team!’ ”

Sue Coplin, who’s in videotape marketing, explained that she was here because “my fiance (Tom Kanarian, a Warner Bros. executive and USC alumnus) is an avid SC fan . . . .I thought I’d like to talk intelligently” about the game.

As class resumed, Cheryl Smith stepped out of her tiered red jersey skirt to reveal something akin to knee-length underwear. She peeled off her red top and there was a maroon and gold USC T-shirt. She wiggled into a pair of gold stretch football pants--”I’m not going to tell you what size they are, either.”

Into pockets in the funny-looking underwear she slipped thigh pads and knee pads and hip pads. “I sure don’t need those,” observed a well-padded woman in the audience. Perhaps, Smith said, but “the men don’t have a lot of fat around there like we do.”

Later, she would observe that football shoulder pads, which resemble the armor of an armadillo, were not designed with bosoms in mind, either.

It was time for more football trivia--the kind they don’t know: One man’s football gear, dry, weighs about 25 pounds. To outfit each player costs between $750 and $1,000, including four different pairs of cleats--for grass, Astroturf, dry weather, wet weather.

In case anyone was wondering, she said, the rules don’t specify whether a player’s name will be on his jersey, along with his number. “Larry doesn’t believe in (it),” she said. “His theory is we’re not a team of individuals,” but a team.

She pulled on an elbow pad and an arm pad, explaining, “The big problem with artificial turf is rug burns.”

One woman, having watched Smith gearing up, observed, “I thought puttin’ on a girdle was bad.”

Another, taking in the pounds of padding, asked, “What does this tell you about the game?”

Smith produced a maroon Trojan helmet with a built-in air cushion and wiggled it up and down on her head. Too loose, she said--”That’s how you get broken necks.” Some of the mothers of football players winced.

“Do you have trouble hearing inside that helmet?” someone else asked. “A little,” she said. “That’s why the quarterback yells.”

Class was over. “Come ready to work” next week, Smith told the women, promising “some heavy-duty plays.”

Coming to this seminar was a matter of “survival,” explained Rosalina Brennan. “I really am a football widow. I’m the only girl in the house.” Her son, David Bayha, played two years on the Loyola High team and plans to be back next year. “I worry, I really do,” she said. “It’s really dangerous. But it’s so much a part of high school life.” Loyola parents, she said, have a name for the required parental consent form--”We call it the death letter.”

Cheryl Smith, who’s been married to Coach Smith for 25 years, said the idea of “Football for Women” hit her when, in the South, she “saw a lot of women who hated football and knew nothing about the game and just got dragged along because it was the social thing to do. They sat through four hours and it was boring, awful.”

When Larry Smith went to the University of Arizona, where he stayed seven years at head coach, she offered the seminar each year.

When women learn the game, she said, they are “the most vocal and supportive sex.”

Her own introduction to football came early: “I grew up in a neighborhood with all boys. It was either fight ‘em or join ‘em. I was the dumb girl who didn’t know anything.”

She is married to a man who “lives and dies this game” and, she said, this is her way of sharing that passion. They met when she was a senior dance major at Ohio State. Smith, then a high school coach, came to a coaching clinic offered by the legendary Woody Hayes. Cheryl Smith was helping at registration. Seven months later, they married.

Her knowledge of football at the time did not go much beyond differentiating between offense and defense, but she asked her bridegroom a lot of questions--and she learned quickly.

When she decided to teach “Football for Women,” she went to her husband for help. “We sat for hours and he diagrammed plays for me.” Until then, she said, “I thought I knew a lot” about football.

She is still learning. If a woman asks a question she can’t answer, she jots it down and “I go home and ask Larry.”

Cheryl and Larry Smith are the parents of a 19-year-old daughter, Ali, and a son, Corby, 17, a senior who quarterbacks the Loyola High team--and plans to play college football. At USC? “It depends,” she said, “on where he’s recruited.”

Sometimes the Smiths dash from a USC afternoon game to a Saturday night Loyola game. If Loyola is playing while USC is on the road, Cheryl Smith stays home. “There’s only one high school career,” she said. “There’ll be a lot more SC games.”

This Saturday, it will be USC vs. Penn State at the Coliseum. Cheryl Smith will be in her customary seat, about 20 rows behind the Trojan bench, in “yelling position. I do a lot of yelling. . . . “ She laughed. “They probably don’t hear me. I probably do it for myself.”

If USC, ranked nationally in the top 10, wins, Larry Smith may come home happy--and he may not. “Sometimes,” she said, “he’ll win a game and come out snarling. Sometimes he loses, and he’s just fine.” It depends, she said, on whether the players and coaches did “their very best.”

Whatever, the Monday morning quarterbacks will have their say--Cheryl Smith among them. “I’m the coach’s wife,” she explained. “I’m allowed to do that.”