Washington Week: Student Voices (O)

USC's failures have made Rose Bowl a dissapointment
By Peter Simones
Daily Trojan, USC
April 22, 2009

Like almost every soon-to-be college freshman in 2005, I looked at my upcoming four years with a bundle of excitement, but a wealth of uncertainty.

I had a girlfriend that was going to be back in Minnesota, I wasn’t confident my major was right for me, I didn’t know where I’d go golfing, and my roomate’s high school sister IMed me before I had a chance to meet the guy.

But I knew one thing for certain: USC football was going to be really, really good.

And it was.

In my first-ever trip to the Coliseum, Reggie Bush and Matt Leinart dropped 28 points on Arkansas in the first eight plays.

And so it went.

LenDale White set the school record for career touchdowns. Dwayne Jarrett caught a season-saving fourth-down pass with severely blurred vision against Notre Dame. Bush gained more than 500 all-purpose yards against Fresno State.

And so it was settled.

USC was favored to win the BCS National Championship by a full touchdown over an undefeated Texas team that won its games by a combined 436 points and embarrassed Colorado 70-3 in the Big 12 Championship.

And so it came crashing down.

The Trojans’ 41-38 loss in the 2006 Rose Bowl led to a disturbingly pompous proposition: Was that season one step away from immortality, or by virtue of being one step short, was it a failure?

Surely you can’t place the onus of “championship or bust” on a college football team, but how do you remember a squad that would still be favored by a touchdown if the title game were to be replayed?

While USC fans considered this question and licked their wounds, their team unexpectedly climbed into position for a shot at redemption the following season. But 5-6 speed bump UCLA morphed into an unavoidable roadblock.

The Rose Bowl absorbed the impact — Michigan was no match for USC.

One year later, it was Stanford — the biggest underdog victor in the history of NCAA football — that did the damage.

The Rose Bowl again absorbed the impact, with USC pounding hapless Illinois.

Finally, in 2008, the best team in America, driven by perhaps the best defense in USC history, slept through the first half at Oregon State.

It woke up to becoming the first team ever to win three-straight Rose Bowl Games after destroying an overmatched Penn State.

And so it continues.

USC’s success during my four years at this school has been matched only by Florida, which won two national championships.

With that success, however, has come the almost unfathomable conclusion that the Rose Bowl — long considered the king of all bowl games — is no longer enough.

Oregon State hasn’t played in the Rose Bowl since 1965. Cal hasn’t gone in 50 years. Arizona has never been.

USC has gone five of the last six years. And it would give anything to never go again.

Last December, shortly after USC wrapped up another 11-1 regular season, I asked a senior starter if he and his graduating classmates, who had already been to three Rose Bowls, were excited at the prospect of returning for a fourth time.

“Man, we don’t want to play in the Rose Bowl,” he said, under condition of anonymity. “The coaches do a good job of trying to make it seem different every year, but there’s only so much they can do.

“We’ll play anywhere but the Rose Bowl.”

Asked about the idea of landing a rematch with Texas in the Fiesta Bowl three years after Vince Young ripped their freshmen hearts out, the senior’s eyes lit up.

Smirking, he said, “I’d like to see them try to go against our defense.”

And there you have it — the college football world according to USC, circa 2009. The artist formerly known as the Sunkist Bowl and the IBM Bowl gets the nod over The Granddaddy of Them All.

USC’s seniors didn’t want to play in the 2009 Rose Bowl. And who can blame them? Fans didn’t want to see them play in the Rose Bowl, either.

As Sports Illustrated writer Austin Murphy wrote before the game, “We know what’s going to happen ... the Trojans will take the 65-inch Liquid Crystal Display TV that is Penn State’s Spread HD offense, and they will stomp and grind it into the Bermuda grass of the Rose Bowl until there is nothing left but pixels.”

And that’s exactly what they did.

It was a fitting conclusion to the most successful run in Rose Bowl history.

It was also a fitting conclusion to one of the most perplexing failures in college football history, marked by too many out-of-place appearances in a stadium that feels too much like home.

USC has failed ESPN and its staple of Trojan-loving analysts. USC has failed the city of Pasadena, which might have to reconsider its love of the Rose Bowl now that the Trojans have warped its revenue model.

USC has failed some of its own players, like Joe McKnight, who has proclaimed after each of the past two seasons that his Trojans are still the best team in the land. USC has failed common logic by fielding arguably the nation’s best team four years running but never ending those seasons with the nation’s top prize.

Make no mistake — USC football’s recent track record is nearly unparalleled — but if the Rose Bowl is no longer desired, then that leaves only one successful outcome: The BCS National Championship.

And how else can you define failure but the absence of success?

It’s the same question that ultimately led Kentucky to force out basketball coach Tubby Smith in 2007, after Smith had compiled a 263-83 record that included five SEC titles, four Elite Eight appearances and one national championship in 1998.

That national title, however, was a distant memory for college basketball’s most elite program. Smith simply didn’t have enough Final Fours to his name.

Regional final losses were as much signs of wasted talent as they were signs of successful seasons.

Granted, Kentucky sits at an extreme of the sports culture spectrum, but Smith’s case raises intriguing questions about the recent history of Pete Carroll’s USC football program.

As long as Carroll remains the Trojans’ coach, an expectation of USC contending for a national title will rank up there with expectations of backyard lilies and Tony Romo choke jobs.

But for a sports-anemic city like Los Angeles, contention might not be enough anymore. After last season’s Oregon State loss, the Coliseum averaged 8,000 fans under capacity. The City of Industry will have you believe that the NFL is on its way.

Carroll consistently trumpets the idea that the Rose Bowl has always been, and will always be, his team’s only goal. As each year passes, however, this statement enters more into conflict with Carroll’s repeated notion that his program wants to do things better than they’ve ever been done before.

No program has ever won three straight Rose Bowls.

In doing so, USC became the only program besides Ohio State from 1973-’76 to reach No. 1 in three of four years while hitting No. 2 in the other year and not win a national title. Success and failure — can they coexist?

Unfortunately, I’ll have to leave that debate to the writers and fans who follow, because my four years are almost up.

In three weeks, I’ll graduate from USC with a bundle of excitement, and a wealth of uncertainty.

My life won’t involve school for the first time in 17 years, I won’t have a girlfriend in Minnesota or in California, and I still don’t know where to find good golf.

I do know, however, that USC will enter another college football season in the top five. And I know that the team will be really, really good.

For better or worse, some things never change.

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