TOP BRASS : AIR FORCE VETERAN TURNED PASS RUSHER NOW RINGS SUN DEVIL OPPONENTS’ BELLS

It’s not a fight, it’s a football game, this 83rd Rose Bowl game.

But to hear one coach talk about one of the matchups that will unfold on Jan. 1, they might as well have scheduled this one at a Las Vegas casino.

In one corner, we have Orlando Pace, hailing from Ohio State, rising 6 feet 6 and weighing 330 pounds, acclaimed as the best offensive lineman in the country.

In the other corner, we have Derrick Rodgers, hailing from Arizona State by way of Okinawa, Memphis and New Orleans, 6-2 and 222, acclaimed as the player who turned the Sun Devils’ defense around this year.

Rodgers, the junior linebacker/defensive end, winced when told many will view his battle with Pace as the game’s best matchup.

“I hope that’s not true, I hope people don’t focus on that,” he said.

“It’s a team game. And we are a team in the truest sense, not a bunch of individuals. And I’m sure Pace feels the same about his team.”

Sorry, Derrick. You and Orlando get top billing on the marquee. Even your coach agrees.

“Pace and Derrick Rodgers . . . They should be able to sell tickets based just on that, right?” Sun Devil Coach Bruce Snyder said Saturday.

“It takes a lot of discipline to just watch two guys up front in a football game, but I think a lot of people are going to do that.”

Snyder and his team hope their 25-year-old Air Force vet’s speed can get him around Pace’s great bulk, Point A, and on his way to Point B, Ohio State quarterbacks Stanley Jackson or Joe Germaine.

Quarterback Jake Plummer has been the Sun Devils’ top story in this 11-0 season, but Rodgers, an unknown four months ago, is a close second. Plummer says Rodgers should be No. 1.

“Without Derrick, we’d be about 7-4,” Plummer said.

He’s talking about a guy who never played high school football, who was an Air Force lab technician for four years and who put on pads for the first time as a 23-year-old at Riverside City College.

Snyder thought he’d recruited a linebacker when he gave Rodgers a scholarship last year. Instead, he wound up with a pass rusher with 4.54 speed, a player so good there’s talk he may leave after one season for the NFL draft.

How good?

--In Arizona State’s 19-0 upset of then-No. 1 Nebraska, Rodgers was in Nebraska’s backfield all night. He provided the emotional topper for the Sun Devil faithful when he tackled quarterback Scott Frost in the end zone for a safety, Rodgers’ second of the game.

At the time, Snyder said it was the greatest game he’d ever seen by a defensive player. “It still is,” he said Saturday.

--In a 42-34 comeback victory over UCLA, Rodgers recovered the fourth-quarter UCLA fumble that set up a go-ahead touchdown for the Sun Devils.

--In the Rose Bowl clincher, a 35-7 victory over California, Rodgers made what might hold up as the Sun Devils’ play of the year. He stripped the ball from Cal quarterback Pat Barnes, and the ball tumbled toward the sideline.

Seeing this, and making certain Barnes wouldn’t recover it, Rodgers spun Barnes in the opposite direction, then fell on him. The play enabled Rodgers’ teammate, Pat Tillman, to recover.

Snyder talked Saturday about Rodgers’ sensational season.

“Every offensive coordinator we faced this year except Nebraska’s geared their game plans away from Derrick,” he said.

“After we beat Arizona [56-14], their coordinator said to me: ‘We tried everything we could think of to neutralize him. None of them worked.’ ”

Rodgers finished the season with 56 tackles (third on the team), 12 sacks (first) and 23 tackles for losses (first) of 139 yards.

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The NFL would be familiar ground. Rodgers has already played there. And blown his own horn about it too.

“I used to play at halftime of the Saints games,” he said, referring to his pre-football, trumpet-playing career.

When he was 11, his mother bought him a horn and hired a music teacher.

While New Orleans neighborhood chums were donning Pop Warner pads, Rodgers learned the trumpet and dreamed of another goal: the St. Augustine High marching band, considered one of the nation’s best.

“I never gave football a thought in high school,” he said.

“I was really into music. I played before the Pope, and for George Bush, the night he was nominated in 1988, and at Mardi Gras. The St. Augustine band program is great, it’s considered the Grambling band of high schools. I also played in the movie, ‘The Big Easy.’ ”

In those days, Rodgers was 150 pounds, slow and clumsy.

Having no career goals in mind, he enlisted in the Air Force in September 1989. He wound up as a lab technician (he’s a microbiology major). While stationed at Okinawa, he suddenly discovered he had become an athlete.

“I signed up for a flag football league, and found I wasn’t slow and clumsy anymore. I could run, catch, tackle, block . . . Some guys I played with suggested I think about college football.”

Upon his discharge, in September 1993, at March Air Force Base near Riverside, he called Barry Meier, coach at Riverside City College.

“The day he called me and said he wanted to try out for the team, I asked him what position he’d played in high school,” Meier said.

“He told me: ‘First trumpet.’

“We have pretty much an open-door policy on guys like him, who’ve never played. But I’m always skeptical. Maybe 99%, they last one, maybe two practices, and you never see them again.

“Derrick was different, of course. He was all over the place, making plays. At first I put him on our defensive scout team and he kicked butt every day. As soon as we got him in games, he was just fantastic.

“He lived in the weight room that off-season, put on 20 or 25 pounds, and had a great second year. He wanted to go to Tennessee, and I sent them videos of Derrick, but they never called me back.”

The Sun Devils’ defensive line coach, Kevin Wolthausen, says Rodgers demonstrated the right stuff literally on day one.

“On the first day of spring football last February, there was something special about the way he ran,” he said.

“We all saw it, the staff and the players. He kind of combined his great passion for football into the way he ran. And his quickness, that explosion off the snap, we saw that immediately too.

“To have had this kind of year, in his first year of college football, is amazing.”

Rodgers’ “passion for football,” Wolthausen said, is an intangible he brought to a team that has gone from 6-5 to 11-0.

“This is basically the same defense we had last year,” Wolthausen said.

“Derrick is our only new all-season starter. He’s given us life, the kind of spark that can turn a team around.”

Rodgers’ memorable ’96 junior season may prove to be his only one in major college. At 26 and with a wife, Sherron, and daughter, Elasia, a country apart (they live in Washington, D.C.), he may elect to leave early for the NFL draft.

“I haven’t made up my mind,” he said.

“After the season I’ll sit down and evaluate it, and go from there.”

Snyder, who was on John Robinson’s Ram staff from 1983-1986, says Rodgers has already asked him for help with his decision.

“I told him I’d support any decision he makes,” Snyder said.

“This is a very mature guy, he will make a good decision. I also told him I would not recruit him a second time, that I thought there were compelling reasons for both him staying and leaving.”

Said Wolthausen: “Derrick knows he’s 25. He plays the game like he’s on a mission, like he knows he’s on a short clock.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

ARIZONA STATE vs. OHIO STATE

* When: Wednesday, Jan. 1

* Time: 1:30 p.m.

* TV: Channel 7