For USC Football, No Profanity Can Say Enough About This Season

Does anybody remember what actually happened in the Trojan War, in Greek mythology?

The Trojan Horse was the turning point, as you’ll recall. They built a giant wooden horse and hid inside, and then once the horse was taken inside the gates they popped out and destroyed the entire city.

But wait—it wasn’t the Trojans that built the horse. It was the opposing Greeks, and it was the Trojans that foolishly brought the horse into their mighty city. Given the opportunity the Greeks burned Troy, slaughtered the Trojans, and sold the women and children as slaves.

Sounds a bit like the 2009 USC Trojans, doesn’t it? Minus the women and children as slaves.

You don’t have to look hard to see that this mighty, Pete Carroll-fueled USC empire has gone down in flames, at least this season. I don’t need to rehash how big of a downfall it is for the Trojans, but you know I’m going to anyway.

Yes, it was the first time that USC has ever lost a November game under Carroll. Yes, the Stanford game was the most points (55) given up by a USC team, ever. Yes, this season is going to break their streaks of seven straight Pac-10 championships, seven straight BCS bowls, and seven straight seasons ending the season ranked #4 or above.

*@&%.

There’s been plenty of finger-pointing, and in various directions. Some blame the true freshman quarterback, others blame the slew of defensive starters that left for the NFL, still others blame the exodus of Carroll’s high-level assistants like Norm Chow and Steve Sarkisian.

I’ll throw one more thought into the mix, and it points the finger somewhere in the vicinity of Pete Carroll.

But I’ll be clear—I feel strongly that Pete Carroll is the greatest coach in college football right now, and right up there with the greatest of all time. He is, more or less, single-handedly responsible for bringing USC’s program back to prominence and keeping it there.

And he’s done it with recruiting. Carroll is the country’s best recruiter, bar none—this is a guy who can recruit a top-level running back to be the third string, who regularly sends his entire linebacker corps to the NFL, and whose quarterback position is a stepping stone to the first round of the draft.

That all said, there are coaches that are better tacticians. Look to Boise State’s Chris Peterson, who has routinely led the Broncos to overachieving without a top-ranked recruiting class. Or look to any of the Mountain West Conference’s Big Three—BYU’s Bronco Mendenhall, Utah’s Kyle Whittingham, or TCU’s Gary Patterson—who have all made big splashes nationally with their respective mid-level recruiting groups.

The shortcomings of Pete the Tactician (that sounds like heresy, doesn’t it) become clear with a little digging. It’s most clearly manifest in close games—that’s where the tactically-skilled come out to shine, when the game becomes a play-calling chess match.

USC, instead, tends to win games with its athletes. They blow the doors off with their offense and overwhelm opponents with defense. From 2002-2008, USC’s seven years of sovereignty, they’ve averaged almost 38 points per game, with an average 22-point margin of victory.

But in close games?

In that seven-year span, the Trojans only scored 21 points or fewer in eight games, and in those contests they went an uncharacteristic 4-4. In games decided by one touchdown or less, they went a miserable 12-9.

And in this 2009 season, for some reason, they find themselves unable to dominate with their athleticism as before. While they were able to eke out a 18-15 win over Ohio State, they turned around to lose the following week to lowly Washington, 16-13.

But for perhaps the first time since the beginning of the USC dynasty, they’ve found themselves facing opponents that are both outgunning them athletically and outcoaching them tactically—namely Oregon and Stanford, coached by Chip Kelly and Jim Harbaugh respectively. As you recall, they lost to Oregon by 27 and to Stanford by 34—when they had not lost a game by more than seven points in that entire span from 2002-2008.

It’s easy to make a 6-3 record look like the end of the world, when it’s still a winning record and the Trojans are still ranked nationally. But as a transplant living in the LA area, I can tell you that with the tradition that the cardinal and gold have assembled, anything short of a BCS National Championship is a disappointment, and anything less than a BCS bowl is a travesty.

And it’s very likely that they’ll be back to form soon. Matt Barkley is a potential 4-year starter, and he’ll continue to build on the successes that he’s had this year. The defense will gain experience, and Carroll will keep a steady influx of the best talent in the country. You don’t stay down long when you have that.

If anything worse happens, like losses to UCLA or Arizona or a humiliating bowl defeat, this season will go down as the exception, the necessary regression to the mean. It’ll be the one season worth forgetting in one of college football’s greatest runs at the top of the sport.

*@&%.