You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
The University of Southern California Trojans are relevant again!
Those are the words uttered during the pandemonium at the end of the USC vs Stanford game.
Saturday night is football night for college football. ABC puts on the best game, and on this night, the best game is coming live from South Central Los Angeles.
The #4 Stanford Cardinal at an unranked, and honestly struggling, U.S.C. Trojans.
The game is in the Los Angeles coliseum.
It’s packed. 90,000 plus fans wearing cardinal and gold are going berzerk. I haven’t seen the coliseum this electrified since The Boss played his Born in the USA tour in 1985.
USC’s season is a jack in the box popping up and smiling at the wrong time. So far the Trojans are a high profile row boat with a hole in the hull. The team tries hard but keeps slowly sinking under its own weight.
Controversial Coach Lane Kiffin has been fired. Fired before he even got off the team bus. That’s a grenade in closed quarters. That implosion would be enough to scuttle the dreams of most collegiate teams. Add to that a squad still reeling from 30 scholarships lost over 3 years.
But this is U.S.C. and the expectations are high.
How high?
This is the only college team in the land that is thought of as an NFL team.
L.A. is the 2nd biggest market in America. No NFL teams? No Rams. No Raiders. Nothing.
UCLA? A powder blue bear wearing a kitchen apron? Please…..
So the expectations in L.A. are unlike anything you have ever seen.
You think it’s hot in Tuscaloosa? You can fit all the people that live in Tuscaloosa in a phone booth compared to L.A.
Knoxville? No offense, but if you got a Ville at the end of your city, you don’t even know what pressure is.
So losing records are not tolerated. Failing to go to the Rose Bowl is not tolerated. Not competing for a national championship, not tolerated. Not having someone on the Heismans watch list? It’s not tolerated.
So the Trojans come out on Saturday night with the hot hand. They stun the Cardinal, forcing them to take 2 time outs in the first 90 seconds of the game. The Trojans dominate the first half taking the lead.
The Cardinal, a powerful, old school football team rams it down the Trojans throats in the 2nd half and tie it up.
With a minute to go in the game it is tied at 17 all.
Like two heavyweights pounding each other with body blows, both teams are wobbling. Someone is ready to go down. But who?
The Cardinal are pounding it down the field. They are ready to win. Everyone expects them to. It’s the way it is written, right?
Then an interception and it’s anyone’s game.
The Trojans are systematically moving down the field with time ticking away, trying to get into field goal position.
The kicker is a mess. He has all ready missed a point after attempt.
He is as accurate as a neutered dog using a moving fire hydrant as his watering hole.
The camera continually cuts to kicker, Andre Heidari, as the team tries to run the ball to the middle of the field to set up the game winning kick.
The tension is thick. The crowd is frenzied.
He trots on the field. My stomach is in knots and I’m 2,000 miles away.
The crowd looks like it wants to throw up a tidal wave of gin and tonic.
No time to vomit.
Snap. Hold. Kick. It’s up.
47 yards. Tension. Floating. Spinning. A kicker who needs time on the psychotherapist’s couch. What’s he thinking? Does he realize how important this kick is? Does he know Trojan Nation rests on his right leg?
A moment in time. A moment in history. The ball is up.
All I see is a huge banner with the words All State.
Nice product placement I think.
IT’S GOOD.
Suddenly a mushroom cloud of Cardinal and Gold erupts in the stands.
It is bedlam. It’s as if New Year’s eve swallowed a hand grenade and burped up a Trojan victory.
The venerable Coliseum is rocking, threatening to blow out the Olympic flame at the top of the stadium.
The camera is shaking, the night is electrified, the Song girls want to pull off their skirts and run naked into the night.
The Cardinal have one last gasp.
:09 seconds.
They complete a pass and then lateral the ball backward 3 times till it is fumbled and then the clock goes to double zeroes.
“And the Trojans are relevant again.”
It is like music to a Trojan’s ears.
USC upsets Stanford.
It’s a statement that is good for college football.
Thousands of delirious fans rush to the field.
Head Coac Ed Orgeron is hugging fans and old guys and kids and anyone with a pulse.
Stanford players walk off the field almost in shocked disbelief.
They have won 5 in a row against a slumping USC and tonight they will go back to the farm losers.
Stanford will fall out of the top ten with 2 losses.
USC will not numerically move up in the rankings, but every Trojan feels it. We moved up in prestige, in reputation, in psyche.
We have turned the corner. We have become relevant again. Top recruits will look at USC again in the same way they look at Alabama and ND and Florida State.
The hazy cloud of sanctions are over and perhaps an interim coaching title just got changed to Head Coach.
“it’s been a long time we’ve been coming and we have not seen this here,” Kirk Herbstreit says over a tv screen full of elation.
The field is gone. It is a 100 yards of cheering and jumping excitement. Cardinal and gold and hope.
The camera circles the field from above and the field is gone, replaced with happy Trojan humanity.
There is an interview with the winning kicker.
People are swallowing him whole, banging on his shoulder pads during the entire interview.
“it was a great team win,” he says. His microphone cuts out continually.
It doesn’t matter what he says. We know what it means.
The camera catches Coach O grabbing a sword and climbing a ladder in the stands. He leads the Trojan Marching Band in a sweet edition of Conquest.
Brent Musburger will say “last week he sent a note to every member of the band and thanked them for being the spirit of the university, so he is being honored by them.”
“Great Football game. both teams. And USC found a way t get it done.” Herbstreit adds.
My phone is blowing up.
Old Trojans from San Diego to South Bend are texting me, excited, exuberant. They too know that the Trojans, one of the most storied football programs in the land has turned the corner, and is headed back to a national landscape of relevancy.
I know this win is big when a University of Tennessee buddy texts me.
“Are you going to get totally inebriated?” he asks.
“I’m elated,” I respond.
“I am too,” he responds. “And I don’t know why.”
I know why.
I do.
Because a relevant USC is good for college football. It brings balance to a sport that needs a power house on the left coast.
A powerful Pac 12 brings balance to a see saw weighted by an SEC gorilla.
It makes a New York-centric national sports media stay up late on Saturday night to see what the other half of the power vacuum is doing.
It gives pause to voters who influence the BCS standings and polls.
A relevant USC gives the 2nd biggest city in America a team to rally around in a city that ridiculously has no NFL team.
So fight on USC.
Great win. It was a win to salvage a season. It was a win that turned the corner toward the future.
Life’s Crazy™