Just Who Are Those Heroes? : Pro football: Nobodies everywhere else, they become somebodies by signing with the expansion Jaguars and Panthers.

Randy Cuthbert has run the football once in his two-year professional career. He has caught one pass. He has returned one kick.

Greeting him today in downtown Charlotte, N.C., will be the dreams of thousands.

Shannon Baker is the NFL equivalent of invisible: two years in Indianapolis. An average of two games and one catch per year.

Today in Jacksonville, Fla., he and several others will become the most popular men in town.

“It’s going to be wild,” Baker said. “We’re going to be all over that city. Everybody there is going to be wanting to see us.”

Finally, there is someone to see.

More than a year after being accepted as the NFL’s 29th and 30th teams, the Carolina Panthers and Jacksonville Jaguars will sign their first players today.

Well, OK, so maybe none of these guys will ever actually play. They will be breathing. For now, that will be enough.

“This means we actually have a team,” gushed Sara Nichols, president of the Jacksonville Jaguar Booster Club. “I’m just afraid these poor players will be mobbed. Everybody is going to follow their every move, because everybody here wants to know just what NFL players do .”

More important is what team officials are doing to build their rosters in preparation for their first game, when they play each other in the Hall of Fame exhibition in Canton, Ohio, next July.

From today until the end of the regular season, each team can sign 10 players. They will add 30-42 more at the Feb. 15 reallocation draft, when each of the 28 teams must expose six veterans.

The roster will be filled out with draft picks--each team will receive two in each of the seven rounds in April--and free agency.

The league’s established owners, wanting the newcomers’ money but not their competition, have worked hard to ensure these stocking methods will not work.

Injured veterans will be allowed in the reallocation draft, even if an independent doctor rules that the injury will mean they miss training camp.

And the two new teams will have only about $20 million to spend on free agency, no more than an average team has available under the salary cap.

“We won’t be able to build any faster than expansion teams like Tampa Bay and Seattle,” Bill Polian, Carolina’s general manager, said. “What you will see is an absence of the core coming through the expansion draft. If each of us get 14 healthy players out of that draft, we will be doing good.

“We’re going to have to build through the college draft. And that will take time.”

Not that any of this has dimmed interest in the two cities, where there are parties planned for today to greet the new arrivals.

Earlier this fall, Cuthbert was stunned while taking part in a six-player midweek tryout on a baseball diamond at the club’s temporary practice facility at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C.

“Usually at these workouts you have a couple of coaches and a stopwatch,” said Cuthbert, 24, who played at nearby Duke. “We drove up and I thought there was a baseball game going on.”

That’s because the field was surrounded with more than 200 fans and media members.

Then there was the prospective employee who wanted to gain the attention of Jaguar management.

During one tryout, held at a high school on Jacksonville’s St. John’s River, the man was spotted on the rocky river bank, water lapping at his shoes, holding his resume.

He had been there for two hours.

“The feeling I get is that the people in Jacksonville are hysterical,” said Baker, 23, one of several Florida State players expected to migrate there.

Hardly immune to the hysteria is the Jaguars’ coach, Tom Coughlin, who worked wonders as a Boston College head coach and New York Giant assistant through his concentration and intensity.

Even without a team this fall, he has practiced those traits, putting his assistants through a 90-hour workweek that culminates in scouting trips to colleges on Saturdays and NFL games on Sundays.

In surely the oddest occurrence in any NFL film room this year, the Jaguars actually used their playbook to stage three mock games against opponents whose plays were extracted from videos.

Rumor has it they went 3-0.

“I want to keep the pressure on us to be the best-prepared team we can be,” Coughlin said. “I have tried to create that pressure.”

Said Nichols: “Coach is a wonderful man who has really opened up to the community. I just hope he doesn’t have a heart attack.”

That will not happen to the Carolina head coach. At least not until they have one.

Preferring to build from the bottom up, the Panthers have hired everybody from scouts to a trainer to an equipment manager . . . everybody but coaches.

“We wanted to have everything in place so we could say, ‘Coach, here’s the key to your office, here’s your scouting reports, here’s the computer technology and printer for your playbook. . . . Go to work,” Polian said.

They also wanted to make sure Joe Gibbs did not want the job.

The former Washington Redskin coach convinced them he wants to spend time with his family and his automobile racing teams. This leaves them to pursue University of Miami Coach Dennis Erickson, who fits their needs as an offensive whiz and program-builder.

What the program will be, either in Carolina and Jacksonville, seems secondary to the fact that, beginning today, their fans will have somebody to cheer.

“The players today will be treated as conquering heroes,” Polian said. “And the first unrestricted free agent we get this spring will be Mr. Carolina.”