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.
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 Woody Hayes as the head coach at Ohio State in 1979.
He was hired at USC in 2001.
"Pete is very effervescent, very likable," said former Notre Dame coach Lou Holtz, now an analyst for ESPN. "He has high energy."
Tressel, the son of a legendary Ohio small-college coach, has never coached in high school or the pros. His stops along the way to Ohio included Akron, Miami (Ohio) and Syracuse before he was hired by Bruce to coach quarterbacks in 1983.
After three years with the Buckeyes, Tressel became the head coach at Youngstown State in 1986 and in 15 seasons led the Penguins to four I-AA national championships. When John Cooper was fired after the 2000 season, Tressel beat out former Ohio State player (and Minnesota head coach) Glen Mason for the Buckeyes' job.
"Jim Tressel is a card player; you never know what he has," Holtz said. "He plays it very close to the vest. But still he's very confident, very smart."
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