UNLIKE FATHER LIKE SON

The comparisons between Nick Cappelletti and his dad, John, the 1973 Heisman Trophy winner at Penn State, pretty much end with the last name.

When Nick Cappelletti steps on the field Saturday night in the Southern Section Division V championship game for top-seeded Santa Margarita, he will be doing so as his own man, not just John’s son.

Nick goes into this game against Tustin at Cal State Fullerton trying to help the Eagles win their second consecutive Division V title. He also sees it as a potential ending point to his own modest football career.

“This season has meant everything to me,” Cappelletti said. “I’ve worked hard to be the best football player I can potentially be.

“This could be the last game I ever play. That’s the way I look at it.”

The only Division I college recruiting him is Penn State--his father’s alma mater. He already has ruled out the Nittany Lions but may walk on at San Diego or San Diego State.

“I don’t really like it if [my name] is the only reason why they’re doing it,” Cappelletti said. “I don’t want to go there, because I’ll only be in his shadow.”

The family name can be a touchy subject with Nick.

“Sometime’s it’s a distraction,” he said. “Because of my last name, they’re my best friend, or they don’t like me because they don’t like my dad.”

Nick Cappelletti is the anchor of Santa Margarita’s defense, which has given up only seven first-half touchdowns this season and nine through three quarters. That statistic is important because the Eagles (13-0) usually have halftime leads that allow the reserves plenty of second-half playing time. Their average margin of victory is 36.2 points.

By linebacker standards, Cappelletti is smallish at 5 feet 11, 175 pounds. His father, a running back, played at 6-1 and 218. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame and played eight seasons in the NFL, four with the Rams.

But if John deserved accolades as a player, Nick deserves them for reaching his own level of success. This is his second season as a starter, but he wasn’t allowed to play tackle football until he reached high school, and it showed.

“He was a freshman on our B team, and people are thinking, ‘Geez, he can’t even make our A team,’ ” Santa Margarita Coach Jim Hartigan said. “You see the name Cappelletti and you expect him to be a star right away or be a running back, but he’s earned his own name and respect. Everything he’s gotten, he has earned.”

Cappelletti has gotten the most out of his physical abilities on his own terms. His dad--a marketing representative for an Irvine company that provides stainless steel hardware for pharmaceutical and biochemical products--hasn’t gotten in the way or tried to get him special favors.

“He’s good about letting me do what I want,” Nick Cappelletti said of his father. “He doesn’t pressure me. He’s not a football dad at all. He’s calm, stays in the background, doesn’t say much. He lets the coach coach.”

Maybe all one needs to know about the Cappelletti home is that dad’s Heisman Trophy shares mantel space alongside the Little League, soccer and football trophies of his four sons, ages 8-17.

John Cappelletti said, “If I never really had a football career, would Nicholas have gone on to do what he did with or without me? I think he would have.

“I can’t expect that [kind of success] from anybody. They have one shot at this and it has to be their shot, not mine. I don’t want them to feel they have to match up to that.

“These are two completely different lives we’re talking about. What I did in the past has no substantial effect on him.”

But Nick Cappelletti does have a substantial effect on Santa Margarita’s defense, which is often overshadowed by its high-powered, flashy offense.

The defense asks the linemen to occupy blockers and expects the linebackers to make most of the tackles. Cappelletti has a team-high 149. He will need a few more to stop second-seeded Tustin (13-0) and its tailback, DeShaun Foster, who has scored 53 touchdowns and is averaging 10.4 yards a carry. Tustin runs Foster out of the I-formation, as well as the double wing.

“In [Santa Margarita’s] 4-3 front, very few teams are going to line up in an I-formation and run the blast [with the fullback leading] at Cappelletti and have success, because you’re not going to have success,” Irvine Woodbridge Coach Rick Gibson said. “He controls tackle to tackle better than anybody we’ve seen this year.”

Hartigan put Cappelletti’s value more simply.

“He is the heart and soul of the defense.”

* CITY SECTION FOOTBALL: San Pedro seeks to repeat as 4-A champion when it plays Taft tonight at Coliseum. C6