Bruins Wary of Beavers : College football: UCLA faces one of few teams that still uses a wishbone offense.

CORVALLIS, Ore. — Once they were true believers in the wishbone, back when Bob Field was coaching under Bear Bryant at Alabama and Terry Donahue under Pepper Rodgers at Kansas and UCLA.

Bryant won national championships with the wishbone and Rodgers went to bowl games with it, gaining yardage in chunks, piling up points and calling on the pass only in times of duress.

Field, UCLA’s defensive coordinator, and Donahue, his boss, cut their coaching teeth on the multiple offense. Now they would not consider using it.

“I think it should be outlawed,” said Donahue, grinning.

“I wish they’d outlaw that offense,” said Field, with less humor.

Once the attack of choice at UCLA, Texas, Texas A&M;, Oklahoma, Georgia Tech and other schools that generated rushing records with it, the wishbone has become the last bastion of undermanned teams looking for an edge. The service academies use it. So does Oregon State, UCLA’s opponent today.

“It helps negate a physical disadvantage, if you have one,” said Donahue. “I think that people who use it feel it evens up the playing field, and I think it does in a lot of ways. I guarantee there’s not a coach in this conference who wouldn’t like to see Oregon State not run a wishbone. Every one of us would like to see them go to a conventional offense.

“You really would like two weeks of preparation for the wishbone. Three, four days isn’t very long.”

Field has had to prepare the 19th-ranked Bruins, 4-2 overall and 2-1 in the Pacific 10. They will face a team that has thrown only 60 passes in seven games, but has rushed for 1,309 yards in the last three weeks, two of which brought victories over Arizona State and Pacific.

The Beavers (3-4, 1-3) are second in the country in rushing at 300.4 yards per game. Only Army is better, at 327.3.

But they are 106th--last--in passing, at 27 yards a game.

“It’s a physical offense,” Field said. “Whoever is covering their wideouts, those guys could go out there and have a conversation about half the game, and the guy would say, ‘Let’s go out there and stand, because this has no bearing on the game.’ ”

No Oregon State wide receiver has caught a touchdown pass this season.

Oregon State plays a slug-it-out game, the kind some defensive players love, others hate. The Bruins have 25 sacks in six games, but the opportunity for that kind of big play might not exist today.

“They just keep coming at you,” linebacker Nkosi Littleton said.

Oregon State is down to its No. 3 quarterback, Rahim Muhammad, who played at Fairfax High.

“Now I know how Terry Donahue felt last season,” Beaver Coach Jerry Pettibone said.

The starter, Don Shanklin, the namesake of Don Shanklin Sr., who was the Orange Bowl most valuable player with the 1969 Kansas team coached by Rodgers and Donahue, is sidelined because of a sprained left foot. Reserve Ian Shields has a sprained ankle.

“(Losing Shanklin) is more disappointing than anything,” Pettibone said. “We were finally getting to the point where we had a quarterback who encompassed what we were striving for in that position.”

What Shanklin did mostly was give the ball to fullback John Young or pitch it to halfbacks J.J. Young, from Pasadena and the team’s leading rusher with 587 yards, or Chad Paulson, who has 370 yards. Shanklin threw only 17 passes, completing 13 for 97 yards in three games. He ran 43 times for 126 yards.

Muhammad has thrown seven passes, completing one for a two-yard touchdown to tight end Ray Penniman in the victory over Pacific. He missed on five attempts against USC last week.

Oregon State’s gambling defense has 16 interceptions. The loss to USC was the first game in which the Beavers did not have one.

The Bruins’ J.J. Stokes, who has scored 10 touchdowns in the last three games and a school-record 12 for the season, presents a problem for an Oregon State defense that is facing a top receiver for the second week in a row.

USC’s Johnnie Morton caught touchdown passes of 23, 49 and 37 yards against the Beavers.

“They’re both Cadillacs,” Pettibone said of Stokes and Morton.

UCLA’s victory over Washington last week made Pettibone a believer.

“I think they’re the best team in the conference right now,” he said. “What they did against Washington ought to convince everybody. It certainly convinced me.”

That 39-25 victory offers a potential problem for the Bruins, who face undefeated Arizona next week in a game that could help decide the conference championship. The possibility of a letdown against Oregon State is real.

A week ago, Donahue said he was not concerned about UCLA’s psychological state, but now he is preaching that “to make the Arizona game a big game, we have to make the Oregon State game a big game.”

He remembers all too well a game 15 years ago in which he took a UCLA team that was undefeated in the Pac-10 and seemingly Rose Bowl bound into Corvallis and limped home with a 15-13 loss. The next week the Bruins lost to USC, which won the conference and national championships.