Dame Coach Lou

COLLEGE PARK -- It's being called the best Maryland football recruiting class in the past decade -- at least five All-Americans and 12 interior linemen, most of them with imposing size and speed.The national signing date for high school players is still one day away, but Maryland already is ranked in the top 25 recruiting classes with at least 21 oral commitments.Coach Mark Duffner says he may sign as many as 25, the NCAA limit."Maryland is competing with the big boys and winning," said Allan Wallace, publisher of the California-based Super Prep magazine.

The bad news came across the wire yesterday: Joe Paterno and Tom Osborne are taking the high road on this No. 1 thing."I haven't heard Joe lobbying and I don't think you'll hear anything like that out of me, either," Osborne said.Civility. What a shame.The argument about the nation's best college football team is always better when pitched into the sporting gutter and marked by the whining, insipid politicking and broad-based insults that are among the hallmarks of college football.Last year, for instance, fans of the West Virginia Mountaineers were convinced that their team couldn't finish No. 1 because voters thought they wore overalls in the shower and called a swimming pool a "ce-ment pond."

Reading Time: Two Minutes.You've read about it a few times, perhaps heard about it on national television and maybe there was even a plane dragging a sign to the effect that the Orioles had passed up the chance to play host to the All-Star Game a couple of times.Lately, of course, they would have been waiting for the dawning of the new ballpark. But the excuse that previous "turns" in the '60s and '70s were passed up because the team wanted to save the city the embarrassment of not selling out just doesn't ring true here.

Reading Time, Two Minutes:Heading into last night's "Monday Night Football" colossal, Dallas quarterback Troy Aikman said, "There's no better place to find out if we're up to it [having another Super Bowl season] than RFK." The kid's no dummy. Washington's 35-16 smashing of the Cowboys seemed to get lost in all the Emmitt Smith furor, which really doesn't interest general fans.* Maryland probably would do a whole lot better selling season tickets for football if it covered just the first three quarters of action.

Reading Time: Two Minutes.As of just a few moments ago, the only professional football team that hadn't made veiled overtures to move here to the Land of Pleasant Living and Milk And Honey was the Bombay Bearcats of the East Indian Football & Field Hockey Federation.Count 'em -- the Bengals, the Buccaneers, the Patriots, the Raiders and the Rams with Phoenix and its crowds in the mid-30s all are thinking about placing an anonymous phone call any minute now. These are all scare tactics and sword-rattling designed to get the local folks on the stick to provide a new stadium or scores of luxury boxes and club seats requiring the purchaser to establish a $100,000 line of credit.

A couple of mistakes to clear up from Friday. First, John Dockery attended Harvard, not Notre Dame. Second, Spiro, the radio voice of Towson State football spells his last name Morekas.Sorry for the errors.Just how free is a sports announcer to report or comment on proceedings, particularly when he or she is dealing with an icon?That's the question John Dockery of NBC has faced since he was assigned to roam the sidelines during Notre Dame football telecasts. He is obligated to elicit information for viewers, but if Dockery pushes too far, he could endanger goodwill between the network and school officials.

The dynasty is over, the mystique gone. These days, the Miami Hurricanes are little more than a tropical depression blowing wind across college football's radar screen.An era that produced four national championships since 1983 wound down last weekend, when the Hurricanes lost to Virginia Tech, 13-7, and one day later were banished from the polls. This was a Virginia Tech team that was beaten by Cincinnati one week earlier, 16-0.How low have the 'Canes sunk?It was the first time they fell out of the rankings since the first poll of 1985.

The team is coming off a 3-9 season, one of the worst in the program's long and legendary history. The coach is starting to feel the heat, despite a 10-year contract and a reputation built working on Super Bowl champion teams. The quarterback has not lived up to the hype that followed him from high school, when he was considered the No. 1 prospect in the country. Notre Dame (5-4) will be in Baltimore tomorrow to play Navy (6-3) at M&T Bank Stadium as a tenuous 31/2-point favorite, riding a two-game losing streak and trying to erase the memory of last year's triple-overtime loss to the Midshipmen in South Bend.

SOUTH BEND, Ind. -- He is a college football legend-in-making, from the uniform he puts on to the statistics he put up in his first game to the reams of material being put out about him across the country.It seems that the only one not making a big deal about Notre Dame quarterback Ron Powlus is Ron Powlus."There's nothing I can do about all the attention and all the hype," Powlus said earlier this week. "The only thing I can do is go out and play."It has been that way for much of the past four years, three record-breaking seasons at Berwick (Pa.)

MIAMI -- In last year's Federal Express Orange Bowl, Colorado suffered a similar fate to that met by Big Eight counterparts Oklahoma and Nebraska in previous years. Buffaloes quarterback Darian Hagan threw only 13 passes. Seven were incomplete. Two were intercepted. Four were completed for 65 yards.And Colorado lost the game, 21-6, to Notre Dame, and its bid for a national championship.So, as the No. 1-ranked Buffaloes (10-1-1) prepared yesterday to meet No. 5 Notre Dame (9-2) in the Orange Bowl on Tuesday, Colorado coach Bill McCartney left little doubt about his game plan.