The Fate of the Trojans

Last week's shocking 47-20 Southern Cal loss to Oregon was interesting not just because it was by far USC's largest margin of defeat in the Pete Carroll era. Indeed, it opens up a whole host of first-in-about-a-decade circumstances for the Trojans. The primary being that USC will very likely NOT win the Pac-10 championship this season! They would need to win out and have Oregon lose twice to take the Pac-10 crown. Assuming that they don't, this will be the first year in quite a while in which the Trojans do NOT have an automatic birth into the Bowl Championship Series. And that's where the questions come in. Does USC get an at-large bid? Does USC , as they say in the parlance of college football bowl selection committees, "travel well"? How do their merits stack up against the likes of, say, Boise State or TCU? And if they don't get the BCS bid, where does that leave them? The Holiday Bowl?!? I think it'd be quite a spectacle to see the Mighty Trojans demoted to the level of playing, say, Kansas State in the Holiday Bowl. Granted, the Holiday Bowl is probably one of the top 10 or 12 most prestigious bowls, but for a program used to playing in either the Rose Bowl or the Championship Game every year, this would be a step down.

To demonstrate the magnitude of the fall that has taken place over just the last game, let's talk about what USC has been used to for the past several years.
In 2001, Pete Carroll took over the coaching reins at Southern Cal after the team limped to a 5-7 record the previous season. That year, they:

• lost 4 close games early to teams that would go on to play in bowls,
• lost by 11 in mid-season to a mediocre Notre Dame team,
• then closed w/ four straight wins before...
• falling by 4 to Utah in the lowly Las Vegas Bowl.
That was USC's last non-BCS bowl before this season!

In 2002, they

• opened with a 24-17 victory over an Auburn team that would go on to represent the SEC in a New Year's Day Bowl (the Capital One Bowl),
• a 40-3 rout of a Colorado team that would go on to play in the Big XII Championship game that season,
• a 20-27 loss at then-BigXII powerhouse Kansas State,
• a 22-0 victory over a bowl-bound Oregon State team, and
• a 3-pt loss on the road to a Washington State team that would go on to win the Pac-10 title that year.

One immediately notes the high quality of the scheduled opponents that USC played to open that year, and how well they played against them. But that's just the beginning.
From their Pete Carroll's crew basically opened up a can of whoop-ass on the entire college football world.
They won 45 of the next 46 games!!!

• The Trojans won out in 2002, to finish 11-2, capping the year by spoiling Iowa's dream season w/ a 38-17 victory over the Hawkeyes in the Orange Bowl.


• They went 12-1 in 2003, with a 3pt loss at Cal as the only blemish on a season in which they split the national title w/ 13-1 LSU.


• In 2004, USC won another national title, going 13-0 and crushing previously unbeaten Oklahoma by 55-19 in the Orange Bowl for the championship.


• USC's best team may have been the 2005 squad, which went 12-0 in the regular season and dominated almost every opponent before falling in the Rose Bowl to also unbeaten Texas on Vince Young's miracle comeback.


• Since then the Trojans returned to mortality, but have still been largely dominant. For the 2006, 2007 and 2008 seasons, they lost a combined 5 Pac-10 games, to finish 11-2, 11-2 and 12-1 respectively with three straight Rose Bowl victories.

In Summary, from 2002 to 2008, the Trojans went 82-9, went to five Rose Bowls and two Orange Bowls, and won six straight Pac-10 titles.

Against the backdrop of that kind of history, a New Year's Eve date w/ Texas Tech or Mizzou in the Holiday Bowl will be a bit of an adjustment.