In light of some questions along the lines of, “What color does this guy wear on 11-27?,” I thought I would clear things up a bit. To that end, see the “clarifying my loyalties” box at left. Isn’t that a lovely picture of Reggie Bush scoring a TD at Notre Dame Stadium last year? Ah, yes… it’s good to be a Trojan. :)

P.S. Yes, yes it is my goal to make everyone here hate me during the next week-and-a-half. :) There’s just so much trash-talking to be done when your alma mater is #1 in the nation!

P.P.S. Speaking of trash-talking, y’all may consider the comments on this post to be open season…

…that with the Newington High School football team three wins away from a state championship, and the University of Southern California football team three wins away from a national championship, I am officially six wins away from alma-mater nirvana. :)

In other news, BoiFromTroy says USC actually hasn’t absolutely, positively clinched a BCS bowl berth:

Unlike other conferences…the Pac Ten states that its Conference Champion is the Conference Champion unless another team from the conerence is #1 or #2 in the BCS, in which case that team is the Conference Champion. This concession was made to guarantee the Rose Bowl a Pac-10 vs. Big-10 matchup in years it did not host the Title game. However–bear with me–if USC were to lose one or both of its remaining games AND California somehow became ranked #1 or #2 in the BCS…AND Utah is ranked in the top 6 in the BCS giving it an automatic berth AND if Texas, a non-conference champion, were ranked #3 or #4 in the BCS and was ranked ahead of USC, then, all of the at-large BCS berths would be taken, leaving an otherwise guaranteed a BCS-berth USC Trojan team in the Holiday Bowl playing Texas A&M.

All the more reason to root for A&M over Texas next week, just in case. GO AGGIES!!!

Trojans 49, Wildcats 9, final!

USC is the first team to officially clinch a BCS bowl berth. Even if, heaven forbid, the Trojans lose one or both of their final two games, against Notre Dame and UCLA, they’d still be headed to the Rose Bowl and a likely rematch with Michigan.

Of course, if they Beat the Irish and F**k the Bruins, as we all know they will, USC will be Orange Bowl-bound. But for now, we can celebrate our Rose Bowl berth. And, of course, we loyal Trojans, looking ahead to our next game, can now cry in unison:

BEAT THE IRISH!

:)

USC leads Arizona, 14-3 at halftime.

UPDATE: Trojans 35, Wildcats 9, end of third quarter.

“BEAT! THE IRISH!” -me, just now, as the band played Conquest

“You’re not making any friends.” -Brian, playing poker with a bunch of fellow Domers in my apartment. :)

P.S. Earlier, singing along with the “Victory March” while rooting for the Irish against Pitt at Notre Dame Stadium, I changed the end of the chorus slightly:

Cheer, cheer for old Notre Dame
Wake up the echoes cheering her name
Send a volley cheer on high
Shake down the thunder from the sky
What though the odds be great or small
Old Notre Dame will win over all
Except when she’s steamrollled by the
Trojans of USC

:)

Wisconsin loses big. Auburn wins big. So it’s down to #1 USC, #2 Oklahoma and #3 Auburn in the Orange Bowl debate. (Perfect Utah and barely-still-unbeaten Boise State have no shot at the national title.) Could it be, for the second year in a row, that USC and an SEC team will be arguing in January over who’s the real national champ?

On this lovely November day in South Bend, it’s 32° outside right now… and we’re about to go tailgating! Woohoo! :)

Today’s games:

Pitt at Notre Dame, 2:30 PM EST, NBC

Arizona at USC, 10:15 PM EST, Fox Sports Net

Go Irish! Fight on Trojans!

Arash is funny and incisive as usual this week, writing (among other things) that “Mike Williams is no Maurice Clarett.” In a good way.

Also: “Steve Spurrier says he’s not interested in coaching the Dolphins. In a related story, the Dolphins say they’re not interested in hiring an overrated, overpaid college coach.” Heh.

The “Top 6 Dumbest Quotes in Sports History” is also very funny. I’m not sure how I feel about this remark, though:

”Nobody in football should be called a genius. A genius is somebody like Norman Einstein.” — Joe Theismann, showing off his Notre Dame education, in 1996.

F***in’ Trojan… oh, wait… nevermind. :) Read the whole thing.

There’s a lot of talk among Arizona fans about the last time U of A played a #1-ranked USC team — October 10, 1981, when the Wildcats’ “60 men believing together” toppled Marcus Allen and the Trojans, 13-10 at the Coliseum.

(more…)

News of possible interest to fellow Trojans: the 901 Club on Figueroa across the street from The Row, universally known as the “9-0″ (”nine-oh”), has temporarily/indefinitely closed its doors in the wake of “a rash of recent police crackdowns” on underage drinking, according to the Daily Trojan. (I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked!)

USC quarterback/blogger Matt Leinart does his best to make it sound like the #1 Trojans (9-0) are taking Arizona (2-7) seriously, but I’m not sure I’m convinced:

This is a team with a good defense. They like to pressure a lot. They have some athletic guys up front and a good secondary. Remember, this is a team that almost beat No. 4 Wisconsin…they only lost 9-7 and missed a field goal that would have won it.

Um, yeah, and they also lost 38-0 to No. 5 Cal… and that was only two weeks ago, not almost two months ago.

But hey, at least we’re not overconfident. And a good thing too, because Arizona will surely be on an emotional high after their victory last weekend over powerhouse Washington in the epic Battle of the Cellar-Dwellars! (Hi Dave. :)

As Leinart points out, if the Trojans win on Saturday, they clinch at least a Rose Bowl appearance.

In a bizarre-looking game that has “flukey upset” written all over it, USC is trailing Oregon State 3-0 in extremely heavy fog in Corvallis, OR. Granted, it’s early in the game, but color me nervous. The Beavers’ field goal was made possible by a Reggie Bush fumble on a punt return, which apparently happened because Bush couldn’t see the ball in the fog. The Trojans also seem to be having trouble running their usual big-play offense because they can’t see far enough down the field for Leinart to throw long passes. And now the Beavers (who are surely more used to this kind of weather, not to mention their old-style Astroturf, than the Trojans are) are threatening again.

P.S. OSU leads 6-0. The good news: they should be up 14-0, but the Trojan defense has made two excellent goalline stands.

Okay, back to CivPro, with the game on mute until something exciting happens… :)

Here’s the front page of today’s USC Daily Trojan:

Looks good. (Since when does the DT have access to AP photos?! I could used that when I was designing the 2000 election front page…) But read closely the deck, just below the banner headline:

Heh.

It seems there were some long lines and provisional-ballot problems on USC’s campus.

Trojan QB Matt Leinart has posted some Gameday pics on his blog, including a shot of Lee Corso with his Trojan helmet and sword, stabbing the Cal bear:

Hahaha! Woohoo!

He’s also got the classic helmet shot:

More here.

And here, again, are my Gameday pics, in case anyone (somehow) missed them. :)

(Over 2,000 hits and 20,000 pageviews yesterday, by the way, thanks to links from We Are SC, USCfootball.com and College Fanatics. Thanks, all!)

Here it is! My gallery of 168 photos from my 25-hour trip to Los Angeles — including 115 from the pre-game ESPN Gameday festivities at the Coliseum yesterday morning — is now available for your viewing pleasure!

Among the funniest pictures are the ones showing some of the homemade signs that USC students and fans waved at the cameras during Gameday’s broadcast. For example:

That last one is a picture of the big screen showing what was being broadcast live on ESPN. Yes, that’s Lee Corso, with the “Corso is a Trojan Man” sign perfectly positioned right behind him. Heh.

In addition to the signs, there are other photos highlights as well, including some I’ve already posted thumbnails of, like the shots of students reacting to Corso’s pick of USC over Cal:

This photo is also cool, and this one shows a cute kid. He’s got nothing on these kids, though:

Cutest. Trojans. Ever. :)

I ran into several people I know: Sean and Neil, also from the USC Class of ‘03, and Kim, Andrew’s and my former colleague and editor at the Daily Trojan.

Also, Paul Kovich, the USC political science adviser, was randomly on my flight from Chicago to Los Angeles, but I didn’t get a picture of him. Oh, and remember the infamous NCAA pool contestant Ben Eng? Well, I met him! And I met BoiFromTroy, too! (Hat tip to Andrew for the diagonal picture — maybe he thought a “straight” picture would be inappropriate? Heh, sorry Boi… :)

Anyway, you should really view the whole thing. There are three pages total in the gallery. Some of the photos are somewhat redundant, and a few are slightly blurry, because I included almost every single picture I took so that folks like Bretly5 who are looking for specific “faces in the crowd” will have the best possible chance of finding them. But there’s lots of good stuff in the gallery, so check it out!

P.S. I realized there’s a glaring omission from this photo-filled post: a picture of Bea! Well, here she is with Andrew amidst the Gameday madness yesterday morning:

P.P.S. The uploaded versions of these photos are only 640 x 480, but the originals are 1600 x 1200, so if anyone wants or needs a full-size version of a particular photo, please email me and let me know!

P.P.P.S. Here’s a sound clip of Chris Fowler talking to the crowd after the live show finished at 9:00 AM PDT.

The L.A. Daily News has a good article about Gameday’s visit to USC, and the impressiveness of the crowd turnout at such an ungodly hour on a Saturday morning. Excerpt:

It was 5:45 a.m. Saturday in Exposition Park, and a couple dozen early risers (or, late-night revelers) began congregating around what looked like an elevated rock concert stage.

A half-hour later, it was up to about 1,000. Every 10 minutes it grew. And grew. And got noisier. And rowdier. …

An estimated 5,000 onlookers in all — maybe 200 were Cal supporters while the rest represented USC — needed to witness if, for the first time in more than 100 road trips, the circus had indeed come to Los Angeles.

“This is a freakin’ great turnout,” [ESPN anchor Chris] Fowler told the crowd, turning back from his desk chair to address the fans as the show was about to start. “I thought L.A. crowds were supposed to be late arriving…”

It is an incredible sight to behold firsthand, both a celebration of all that’s best about college football and a frightening reflection of today’s TV-makes-everything-important mentality. Despite all the accolades bestowed upon USC’s football team, not just the past two years but in the school’s storied history, it’s not until the “GameDay” crew decides to make a Josh Booty call that some feel the program has finally received its proper props.

The money quote comes from Fowler: “We’ve had bigger crowds as far as raw numbers, but none was as awesome as this one this morning. I thought I’d come out here and there’d be a few hundred, and I’d be buying doughnuts for everyone.”

P.S. You can hear a portion of Fowler’s pre-show speech to the crowd, audio-blogged live by yours truly, here.