White Is Mr. Right Against Trojans : College football: Two years after the Arizona quarterback pulled off a stunner, USC faces him again and the bad memories remain.

If ever a football team was shellshocked, it was USC late on the night of Oct. 2, 1993.

In the worst beating of his college coaching career, John Robinson’s team had just been torched by a previously anonymous quarterback, Dan White, 38-7.

And in a sense, Robinson and his staff are still shellshocked, even though they beat White and Arizona, 45-28, in last year’s rematch at the Coliseum.

Keith Burns, who coached the safeties that night and now is Robinson’s defensive coordinator, would prefer not to remember the night Arizona ran up a 28-0 halftime lead and was ahead, 38-0, before two backups, Kyle Wachholtz and Rory Brown, saved the Trojans from a shutout.

“Based on how they’ve all played against us, Danny White is the best quarterback USC has played [against] since I’ve been here,” said Burns, now in his third season at USC.

“He surprised us that night. We’d seen him on film and he seemed kind of ordinary. But we came out of that game figuring he was better than good. Against us, he got famous.”

White has never been ordinary. He has been streaky, however, and isn’t often spoken of as one of the premier college quarterbacks. But Robinson disagrees.

“You’ll see that guy play in the NFL,” he said.

Burns said, “His deep ball is unbelievable. He puts it right on the money. We beat him last year, but he completed two long balls on us that only his guys could have caught.”

White is a 6-foot-5, 215-pound senior from San Diego, via Penn State. He is a three-season starter for the Wildcats (2-1). USC (2-0) gets to play him again in Arizona Stadium on Saturday night.

Against USC the last two seasons, he has completed 40 of 69 passes for 598 yards and six touchdowns.

In the 1993 game, he was 14 for 21, passed for three scores and ran for another. The player who looked ordinary on film resembled Joe Namath in the game.

“I can’t explain that ’93 game,” White said. “Everything just clicked that night. We had a good run game against SC that night [202 yards], and that opened up our pass game.

“Last year’s game, I got a lot of yards but it wasn’t one of my better games. I threw two interceptions. SC was just much better that night than we were.”

Lately, life with the Arizona football team has been more than passing yardage.

On Sept. 7, tight end Damon Terrell died suddenly while recovering from an August operation to remove a ruptured spleen. The team was told after it had rallied to beat Georgia Tech that night, 20-19.

Last Saturday, Arizona played without its coach, Dick Tomey, and lost at Illinois, 9-7. Tomey missed his team’s game for the first time in his 33-year coaching career while attending Terrell’s funeral in Los Angeles.

“As much as we can, we’ve put it behind us,” White said. “But Damon will always be with us, in our memories.”

White was a nationally recruited quarterback at Point Loma High, having thrown 26 touchdown passes his senior year. Penn State entered the bidding, upon learning that his father, Jack, was the same Jack White who had been a Penn State quarterback in the mid-60s.

“My dad grew up in Pennsylvania and I still have a lot of relatives back there, so I felt comfortable going with Penn State,” said White, whose father is now a San Diego dentist.

White, though, soon found himself behind Kerry Collins on the Penn State depth chart, with little hope of ever being No. 1.

The tipoff: He passed for 199 yards in the 1991 Penn State spring game and wound up third on the depth chart.

“I wasn’t happy, I was far from home and I wasn’t getting a real shot at the quarterback situation,” he said. “I told my high school coach I wanted to transfer and he put the word out.

“I gave San Diego State a verbal commitment, but then I visited Arizona and loved it--the campus, the football situation, everything.”

White, 18-6 as an Arizona starter, has a 56% completion rate after three games. He has thrown for 655 yards and seven touchdowns--and three interceptions.

Arizonans figured White might be something special in his first game in 1993, a 24-6 victory over Texas El Paso, four weeks before he clocked USC. He played shakily in the first half, but completed six consecutive third-down passes in the second.

But numbers don’t seem to mean much to White.

“I’m just a pure pocket passer with a strong arm,” he said. “I’m not much for stats. I don’t even know what mine are. All I care about is winning games.”

White’s coaches are often miffed over his poor attendance in the weight room.

“We’ve talked about that more than once,” said Arizona offensive coordinator Duane Akina. “He knows we think he spends too much time on the golf course in the summer and not enough time lifting weights.”

Robinson hopes his new and retooled defense can experience something like the success Illinois had against White last Saturday. The Illini sacked White six times and held him to 195 yards as he went 17 for 34.

“Based on how he’s played against us, I expect White will send limos to our hotel, to make sure we show up on time,” Robinson said.