COLUMBUS, Ohio - One springs practical jokes on his team, oozes charisma and sprinkles his conversation with the word “dude.” He’s been called an “aging hipster dad.”

The other wears sweater vests, refers to his players as “young champions” and appears to part his hair with a laser pointer it’s so straight. Even those closest to him marvel at his single-point focus and privately chuckle that he may not have human emotions.

Simpson was grilled about her private life by the ladies on "The View." When Barbara Walters asked her "true or false" if she was moving in with Romo, Simpson hesitated before saying "no comment." Then she laughed and said "I gotta get used to saying that." Simpson did admit to changing her cellphone numbers and e-mail contacts so old boyfriends can't contact her.

Simpson has a new country album out called "Do You Know."

Southern California’s Pete Carroll and Ohio State’s Jim Tressel are both in their mid-50s and have been coaching ultra-successful college football programs for eight seasons.

They meet in a showdown Saturday night at the Los Angeles Coliseum. Their programs have so much in common, yet it would be hard to fathom two more different personalities at the top.

“Carroll is like one of the kids. I can’t wait to see him when he’s 70,” said Trev Alberts, former Nebraska star and an analyst for CBS College Sports. “Tressel couldn’t be that way — he’d get laughed at. But he is very comfortable and confident in who he is and how he does things.”

Both are hard workers, of course. Both have also been accused of being overly ambitious. They’ve taken widely divergent paths to get to the apex of their sport.

Carroll, like Tressel, was a quarterback in high school. He spent three years as a graduate assistant at his alma mater, Pacific, before working as a GA for another season at Arkansas. Earle Bruce, then the coach at Iowa State, gave him his first full-time job coaching the secondary in 1978 and then brought him along when he succeeded Hall of Famer Woody Hayes as the head coach at Ohio State in 1979.

Bruce, now retired and living part of the year in Columbus where he is an Ohio State football analyst on radio, remembers Carroll as a young, raw coach.

“Pete was alert, he knew the game of football,” he said. “He could relate well with kids. But the Southern Cal kid he would relate to better. He really fits the Southern Cal job very, very well.”

Carroll spent only one year at Ohio State, but has vivid memories.

One day he was sitting in a football office at drab St. John Arena. He then spotted Hayes, who had been fired for punching a player at the 1978 Gator Bowl, walking back from teaching a class. Carroll ran outside.

“I introduced myself and we walked for about 10 minutes. He knew who I was. I was all thrilled,” Carroll said. “We talked football. That was my one chance I had to visit with him.”

Six years later, Carroll was an NFL assistant. After nine years as an assistant he spent a year as the head coach of the New York Jets, going 6-10. Fired from that job, he spent two more years back in his hometown of San Francisco as the 49ers’ defensive coordinator before going 27-21 in three years as the head coach of the New England Patriots. Let go after the 1999 season, he was hired at USC in 2001. Since then, all he’s done is go 76-14, win national championships in 2003 and 2004 and guide his team to the No. 1 spot this year.

“Pete is very effervescent, very likable,” said former Notre Dame coach Lou Holtz, now an analyst for ESPN. “He has high energy.”

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