Paterno, Brooks Begin Bowl Hype : Rose Bowl: Penn State chases national title, but Oregon simply wants a bowl victory and not spoiler status.

Another month of Rose Bowl fun and nonsense began Wednesday in Pasadena, where Joe Paterno, coach of the undefeated Penn State football team, acknowledged that he is a Nebraska fan.

“But I think next year would be better for Nebraska,” he said.

All the talk about the No. 1 Cornhuskers and Paterno’s No. 2 Nittany Lions hasn’t discouraged Oregon Coach Rich Brooks, who will line up the ninth-ranked Ducks against Penn State on Jan. 2.

“We didn’t get here by playing bad football,” said Brooks, whose team, after starting 1-2, reached 3-3 at midseason, then won the Pacific 10 Conference by winning its last six.

His goal, Brooks said, is not to knock Penn State out of a possible national championship. Coaches who start 1-2 don’t have much use for the polls.

“Our goal is to win the Rose Bowl,” said Brooks, who has been at Oregon for 18 years.

The coaches of the 81st game met reporters for first time together in Pasadena.

“I never dreamed it would take 18 years to get here,” Brooks, 53, said.

Paterno, 67, said: “If I’d had to wait 18 years to get here, I’d have been 84 years old.

“I’m going to try to (coach) another five years.”

This in a sense is his Rose Bowl, win or lose, after 45 seasons at Penn State, where he began as a 22-year-old coaching assistant. Head coach for 29 years, Paterno has been teaching Nittany Lions through the administrations of 10 U.S. presidents.

With 15 bowl-game victories, he is tied with Bear Bryant for No. 1. He is 11-4 in the Orange, Cotton, Sugar and Fiesta bowls.

But he is 0-0 at the Rose Bowl.

Penn State had to push its way into the Big Ten to get this chance, and that was a happy Paterno development, for which he disclaims any responsibility.

“Penn State needed a conference (affiliation),” he said, then changed the subject.

Paterno will play in Pasadena with two Heisman Trophy candidates, quarterback Kerry Collins and tailback Ki-Jana Carter, who have attracted so much national attention that they might well cancel each other out.

“They both played their way into (Heisman) contention,” Paterno said, suggesting that’s exactly the way it should be.

If divided support for two Nittany Lions costs the university a Heisman winner, it might also be a recruiting loss. The better high school players prize environments conducive to Heisman recognition.

But that doesn’t worry Paterno.

“We have a good young team,” he said. “We’ve got six-seven good young players who haven’t even played yet. Recruiting is (tricky). Not everyone wants to go to Eugene, Oregon.”

Eugene is the home of the Ducks, who, Brooks noted, recruit in California.

“We take the ones SC and UCLA don’t want,” he said.

Brooks identified the USC game as the key to his season. In an October rout that still baffles the Trojans, the Ducks came into the Coliseum and won, 22-7.

“That proved that we didn’t need any one player to win as a team,” Brooks said, noting that Oregon succeeded “without our quarterback, our best back and our best cornerback.”

Until that day, Brooks, who got to the Rose Bowl with a 9-3 team against Penn State’s 11-0 squad, had taken some heavy criticism in the Northwest.

But in the flow of public opinion, pessimism, is one of the two things he discounts. The other is optimism.

“If you let either criticism or praise infiltrate your mind, you don’t improve,” he said.

As a football coach, Brooks is sure to get one or the other a month hence, when Paterno, whose undefeated team is his seventh, will be going for all-time records.

Only three others, Frank Thomas of Alabama, Bob Neyland of Tennessee and Bill Alexander of Georgia Tech, have coached in all four major bowls, the Rose, Orange, Cotton and Sugar.

Paterno can become the first to win all four.