Norm Chow is Dead to Me

No, not really; I'm just formally disowning him. I harbor no ill will toward Norm Chow and I wish him happiness, but not luck or success when it comes to his new job (which he obviously does not need). Chow is no longer a Trojan. He is a Bruin, so he is now the enemy.

Therefore, you will no longer see me pining after his masterful play-calling. Chow has been gone almost as many years as he was originally with the Trojans. Objectively speaking, there has been no drop-off in offensive production over the last two seasons compared to 2002-2004, Chow's last three years with the Trojans. Refer to USC Trojan Football Analysis for evidence of that assertion. Art of Troy has convinced me that the decreased level of scoring over the last two seasons is actually the result of less opportunistic defensive play, especially in terms of turnovers and direct scoring by the defense.

I obviously have a lot of respect for Chow. He is a fantastic coach and he's getting a lot of well-deserved love from pundits after UCLA's upset of Tennessee. I still believe we would have between one and three more national titles (2005-2007) if he had stayed, but that has to do with better play-calling at critical moments in crucial games, and everyone knows hindsight is 20-20.

If UCLA's new coaching staff helps revive a real rivalry between USC and UCLA, that would be a good thing. However, UCLA first has a lot of work to do on the field. They are off to a good start in 2008, but it's way too early to pass judgment on the success or failure of the new Bruin regime. Pete Carroll went 6-6 his first year at USC with Chow and DeWayne Walker on his staff. It will be interesting to compare Rick Neuheisel's first year at UCLA with Carroll's first year at USC.

L.A. Times background info on Chow to UCLA here (my first draft of this post was back in January).

Virginia Weekender

The best thing about USC opening their season against UVA in Charlottesville was I got to go to the game! We hitched a ride from DC to Charlottesville on one of the USC Alumni Association charter buses and hung out before the game at the USC tailgate inside UVA's basketball arena, John Paul Jones Arena. We'd been to Charlottesville and the UVA campus before, so we didn't spend any time wandering around campus except for our walk to the stadium.


Scott Stadium from Row Y, Section 521. I read this game set an attendance record for the stadium.


Joe McKnight flies through the air for the Trojans' second touchdown. Pete Carroll celebrates in the background.


Scott Stadium was a pretty cool stadium for college football, especially the lawn behind the opposite end zone.


Marc Tyler's catch and run for a touchdown.


Only Row Z offered respite from the oppressive heat, thanks to a breeze coming over the top of the stadium. We noticed only the home team's benches had canopies providing shade.

Bring on the Buckeyes!

Pete Carroll Is Glad for UCLA

From Ted Miller:

We hear a lot of stuff from the SEC -- I think that's a great statement that UCLA was able to knock those guys off," Carroll said. "I don't know what they'll say from the other side, but you can't make a stronger statement. One of their stronger teams got beaten by a first opportunity for a new coach in a new program. It was a great win for UCLA and I think it does make a big statement. I'm glad it happened.

And why not? It reflects well on the Pac-10, and I don't think for one minute anything UCLA does across town influences Carroll's philosophy about running a football program. Sure, he's competitive, but his focus won't turn to UCLA until November 30, the Sunday before the regular season finale against UCLA. Therein lies the primary difference between USC football and UCLA football: USC measures success by conference titles, BCS bowl victories, and national championships; UCLA measures success by its status in relation to USC.

Previous musings on this topic here.

I Love This Shit

All is right and good in the Pac-10 when the media is writing stuff like this:

Nine tenths of the Pac-10 feels no hope.

This group, from Tucson to Seattle to Eugene to Berkeley to Westwood, looks up and sees USC's Men of Troy standing above, smirking in their Cardinal & Gold Armani armor, which sports six gaudy, sequential badges of Pac-10 supremacy.

Watching the historical dominance of the Pac-10 by the Trojans be reflected in the present day, but to a greater degree, is extremely satisfying to one brought into the fold during the 1990s.

It Was Fun While It Lasted

This is what I wrote and intended to post under the heading "It Was Fun While It Lasted" after USC's last loss to Oregon on October 27:

First of all, USC can still finish 10-2 and go to a BCS bowl, so there's plenty to play for. Although the Trojans lost to Oregon last Saturday, their play demonstrated that USC can beat anybody if they eliminate costly mistakes such as red-zone turnovers and big penalties. That includes Oregon State, Cal, Arizona State, and UCLA, the four remaining teams on USC's schedule.

Nevertheless, the Trojans five-year reign over the Pac-10 has unfortunately come to an end. After last Saturday, there is no longer any question that the Trojans have descended from their perch as the dominant program in college football to being merely a 'good' team. As fans, it hurts so much because we know how it feels to be at the top.

At a time like this, it is critical to maintain perspective. As disappointed as we all are right now, we are seven years removed from the darkest days of USC football, before Pete Carroll arrived to lead the Trojans back from irrelevance and mediocrity. The program is incomparably stronger than it was in 2000. USC has not lost its potential to be a great team and there is no reason to believe USC will not continue to compete for Pac-10 and national championships every year.

I don't remember why I didn't follow through with the post (I probably determined it was excessively negative), but having not deleted the draft provides insight into my thinking at the low point of the 2007 season. Clearly, I jumped the gun in giving up on the Pac-10 title and overreacted regarding the Trojans' status in college football. However, until Oregon lost Dennis Dixon, it looked like the Ducks were going to roll through the rest of the conference and into the BCS National Championship Game, where they would have been this year's selection to beat up an over-matched Ohio State team, instead of LSU. So, USC probably owes its sixth consecutive Pac-10 title to Oregon's misfortune (as does LSU its BCS title). Of course, the Trojans had more than their fair share of injuries to overcome.

My thinking was on the mark in other aspects, including my assessment of the team's chances against the remainder of their schedule. Happily, the team also believed there was still plenty to play for, regrouped, and finished the season impressively. Consequently, the 2007 season was "successful", based on my arbitrarily-defined criteria, and the Trojans appear poised to again contend for the national championship in 2008, just as I predicted.

Classy Bruins

Here's an interesting bit of news from Scott Wolf about UCLA's "elegant" handling of the basketball rivalry.

Can Slick Rick Deliver?

The impression I have, based on some Rick Neuheisel statements since he was hired as UCLA's new football coach, is that he is establishing a definition of success for his tenure that is based on UCLA's future performance in relation to USC. I don't mean just UCLA's head-to-head record against USC, but also an ability to win championships and bowl games at a rate comparable to USC. Neuheisel's statements include his televised interview from the stands as a spectator at the Rose Bowl game and his recorded telephone message to UCLA supporters, in which he said, “The team across town has risen to national prominence, and it’s time we meet this head on.”

I respect this approach, but is he setting up himself and his program to fail? My guess is UCLA fans expect to beat the Trojans about as often as they lose to them. Is that a realistic expectation right now? In the past quarter century, USC is 12-12-1 against UCLA, but that includes an eight-game losing streak during the 1990s, pre-Carroll. With Pete Carroll at the helm, the Trojans climbed the college football mountain and have performed at an elite, unprecedentedly consistent level – the 2008 Rose Bowl championship gives the Trojans a 5-1 record over six consecutive BCS bowl appearances. In the same period of time, UCLA has compiled a 43-33 (28-22 Pac-10) record including a 2-4 record in bowl games, none of which were played on or after New Year’s Day.

I don’t expect the Trojans to beat UCLA every year in perpetuity (I can live with one loss out of nine!), but Neuheisel is sowing the seeds of disappointment unless he can engineer a dramatic turnaround in the fortunes of both programs. If he cannot, his performance will not compare favorably against the bar he is setting, and he may not last long in what is probably his last chance as a head coach in the college game.

More Crushing on Pete Carroll

Here's a link to a mind-blowing article on Pete Carroll from Los Angeles magazine: 23 Reasons Why a Profile of Pete Carroll Does Not Appear in this Space. This guy never ceases to amaze me. Halfway through, I'm very happy to read the following:

His first task: Turn USC into the grandest college dynasty ever. Not this week’s number one team but history’s. “To win forever,” he says . . . .

Sounds impossible, right? Unrealistically ambitious? Read the article and you'll have a tough time not believing he can pull it off.

Even after almost seven years at the helm of USC football, you'll learn things about the man that sound like they were lifted out of a movie script, like this:

Along the way [Bo] Taylor tells me that he and Carroll do this often. They make late-night journeys through the dicey precincts of Los Angeles. Alone, unarmed, they cruise the desolate, impoverished, crime-ridden streets, meeting as many people (mostly young men) as possible. The mission: Let them know that someone busy, someone famous, someone well known for winning, is thinking about them, rooting for them. The young men have hard stories, grim stories, about their everyday lives, and at the very least Carroll’s visit gives them a different story to tell tomorrow.

[. . .]

We start in east South-Central, a block without streetlights, without stores. Broken glass in the gutters. Fog and gloom in the air. We hop out and approach a group of young men bunched on the sidewalk. Glassy-eyed, they’re either drunk, stoned, or else just dangerously bored. They recognize Carroll right away. Several look around for news trucks and politicians, and they can’t hide their shock when they realize that Carroll is here, relatively speaking, alone.

Carroll shakes hands, asks how everyone’s doing. He marches up and down the sidewalk, the same way he marches up and down a sideline—exhorting, pumping his fist. At first the young men are nervous, starstruck , shy. Gradually they relax. They talk about football, of course, but also about the police, about how difficult it is to find a job. They talk about their lives, and their heads snap back when Carroll listens.

This anecdote from Carroll's tenure with the NY Jets also caught my eye:

And at the end of my talk I say, ‘As we get through it, I’ll explain it more to you, and I know this to be true so much right now that thunder will strike—’” At that moment, Carroll says, he struck a table with his fist and a clap of thunder shook the building. His coaches, he says, turned white. I turn a little pale myself. “At bed check,” he says, laughing, “I found guys curled up, reading their Bibles.”

Read it.

HT: TrojanWire.

I Still Miss Norm

At about this time in 2006, I lamented the absence of Norm Chow and expressed my belief that USC was worse off without Chow. I had hope after the Nebraska game that USC might finally be learning to fill the void, but the 2007 season since then has killed that hope. This column by Jon Wilner makes many of the same points I made in 2005 to argue that USC has not adequately replaced Chow's skill sets:

USC should not be scoring 23 points against Stanford, 20 against Arizona and 17 against Oregon. It should not be committing 10 turnovers in those three games (the Trojans are last in the league in turnover margin). There’s too much talent, way, way too much talent on the USC side of the ball. And those other teams, Arizona, Oregon and Stanford — they aren’t very good defensively (fifth, seventh and ninth in the Pac-10, respectively).

[. . .]

In Year One A.N. (After Norm), the Trojans had arguably the best array of offensive talent in Pac-10 history, and there have been some pretty good offenses in this league:

A Heisman-winning quarterback, the best tailback of his generation, another tailback who scored 26 touchdowns, plus two NFL receivers and three first-team all-league linemen. The Trojans averaged 49 points and almost 600 yards per game and play-callers Steve Sarkisian and Lane Kiffin looked like they were little Norm Jrs. But you didn’t need to be an offensive mastermind to Get the ball to Reggie.

The past two years, the Trojans have gotten progressively sloppier, more predictable and far less effective. Some of the decline has to do with personnel, but not all of it — not even close to all of it.

[. . .]

Chow would never run when everyone knew a run was coming, he’d never call all those swing passes and bubble screens, all those quick outs that are easy to see coming and even easier to defend. He’d be throwing downfield – and doing it effectively.

I believe that Steve Sarkisian is a smart coach, and I believe that he will learn from his mistakes, but he is relatively inexperienced and it is hard to not think of what might have been had Pete Carroll conducted a nation-wide search to find a replacement for Chow. I hope that promoting first Lane Kiffin and now Sarkisian to Chow's former position pays off in the long run for USC, but the USC football program should not be in the business of providing on-the-job training!

Healing?

The Trojans appear to be returning to near full-strength just in the nick of time. I expect Saturday’s game at Oregon to be the most challenging game of the regular season for the Trojans.

Here is the projected depth chart for the 2007 Trojans updated to reflect the current injury situation to the best of my knowledge. I should note that I was surprised to see Brian Cushing, Rey Maualuga, and especially Stafon Johnson play as much as they did at Notre Dame.


Affected players’ names are followed by a number indicating the number of games he has missed so far this year due to injury and his status for the Oregon game.
Strikethroughs indicate players who are out for the year.
Contrary to USC’s official press release last week, Nick Howell is not out for the year.

The linebacker corps has returned to virtually full strength. Cushing, Maualuga, and Keith Rivers are all finally ready to start together for the first time since the Idaho game. The secondary will also be starting their strongest line-up, excepting Josh Pinkard who is lost for the year. Finally, the offensive line is surely returning to health. The 2007 projected starting offensive line of Sam Baker, Jeff Byers, Matt Spanos, Chilo Rachal, and Drew Radovich will probably start together for the first time this year.

Mark Sanchez will start again in place of the healing John David Booty. That might be a good thing.

I am very excited about tomorrow’s game. This is about the time Pete Carroll’s Trojan teams have engaged the afterburners in years past, and last week at Notre Dame they played their most complete game of the season. Of course, Notre Dame is no Oregon (this phrase normally having the opposite meaning than in 2007) and Notre Dame Stadium is no Autzen. However, I believe tomorrow we will finally be privileged to see the Trojan football team everyone expected at the beginning of the season.