The University of Southern California Football Dynasty, a proud program that had enjoyed immeasurable success in the Pacific-10 Conference and the admiration and envy of most other football schools, even though it had frequently squandered chances to accumulate more than the two Mythical National Championships it was bestowed in 2003 and 2004, died Saturday night. It was seven.
The Trojans were murdered in part by the University of Oregon Ducks in Eugene, Ore., which used a zone-read offense led by a person identified as Jeremiah Masoli and a punishing defense to slice, steamroll and suffocate them over the course of three long hours. But experts are calling it a combination homicide-suicide, saying the death was hastened by injuries and piss-poor tackling. Friends who witnessed the killing say it was torture to watch the team look confounded as the Ducks raced around and through them all evening. Some noted that just past halfway through the ordeal, the Trojans looked listless and pathetic. In fact, many of them were afraid that the memories of seeing them appear to give up all hope about a quarter before finally expiring on Autzen Field on Halloween Night, going through the motions as though they were utterly broken by a dominant team, a sight they had never seen before, would be seared into their brains forever.
The death brings to an end a period of immense prosperity for the University of Southern California and all its alumni and fans worldwide, some of whom had lived on campus for some of the recent darker days of the football program, namely 1994 to 1998. In 2001, the program went looking for a new leader after its previous one, Paul Hackett, had seemingly plunged the team and the school deeper into an abyss of college football mediocrity and unimportance. After having its dowry of beautiful Los Angeles weather and nubile Song Girls spurned by three men, they settled upon Pete Carroll, himself a failure leading professional football squads in New Jersey and the Boston area.
Although Carroll had to spend his first season retooling the team, which struggled through a .500 record, there were signs of a Renaissance, most notably massacres of the Universities of California at both Berkeley and Los Angeles on two consecutive November Saturdays. The birth of the USC Football Dynasty was on September 2, 2002, when they dispatched Auburn University. They would go on to lose two battles that year, none after early October. At the end of the year they staked their claim to reemergence on the national college football scene by vanquishing Iowa in a game in Miami dubbed the Orange Bowl. They would rampage their way across the country back to South Florida two seasons later – this time, dismantling the University of Oklahoma in that year’s Orange Bowl, for which they were deemed the strongest team in college football and bequeathed a football made out of pure crystal, a trophy that a few said looked ridiculous and effeminate.
They were also one of two schools given a Mythical National Championship in 2003, the result of a completely successful campaign where they destroyed every single program they faced except for Cal. The mysterious forces who chose both Oklahoma and Louisiana State University to vie for the Mythical National Championship gave absolutely no credible reason to deny the Trojan Football Dynasty that season, even though no school was able to be victorious all year. A faction of writers would declare that they recognized USC as the greatest team in all the land, and their people rejoiced all the same.
As a result of the bizarre ending to their 2003 year, the 2004 MNC team played under the slogan, “Leave No Doubt.” Ironically, leaving doubt soon became a nagging and controversial blight in the dynasty.
The cracks in the fissure began with the 2005 MNC Game when, playing against the University of Texas, a program many believed was inferior to them, they were the ones who lost. Their field general was Vince Young, who felled the might Trojan program with his fleet feet. While USC’s charges believed that loss was but a fluke, God’s roll of the dice that supplied a lesson in humility, it instead started a trend where the team would be defeated by a program, and sometimes two programs, that were vastly subordinate to them talent-wise – Oregon State University and UCLA in 2006; Stanford University and Oregon in 2007; Oregon State again in 2008. Each setback was seen as reason enough to deny the team a chance to fight for the Gay Trophy. Yet the Dynasty, and many of its followers, was sated by the seven consecutive Pacific-10 Conference titles they claimed and the ensuing trip the Rose Bowl, played 14 miles away in the stadium also named the Rose Bowl, which is the home fortress of its city rivals, UCLA.
Such satisfaction with this level of success was severely tested this year, when the University of Washington overcame the USC Football Dynasty on September 19. Many Trojan acolytes feared for the end of the Dynasty. And that came to a resounding end All Hallows’ Eve, where they suffered the worst numerical defeat in its seven-year existence. The details only amplify how permanent the beatdown is: most points allowed; largest numerical ass-kicking; 391 yards gained on the ground; 613 yards given away in total. Not in any of the temporary setbacks have the quantitative analytics been so stark. Worse though, many of USC’s now-downtrodden and confused supporters were puzzled, even outraged over the many ways their vaunted defense looked so stupid and incompetent in the Oregon night – the lack of a pass rush, the lazy arm-tackling, the ambivalent and cowardly pass coverage, even hunting down the man who did not have the ball. Matt Barkley, quarterback of the USC Football Dynasty’s offense, did little to turn the tide, frequently misfiring the football to his depleted receiver corps.
Whenever one of those supposedly lesser squads rose up to defeat the Dynasty, their fans would amass, to the field of their victory to celebrate, as if drawn to a benediction by the Pope. A few USC fans did not understand the ecstatic reaction that followed every single one of these games, for it became clear, especially in the past few years, that this USC program was not the title-contending program many of its opponents envied and loathed. But the joyous celebration at Brooks Field was not just for their thoroughly eviscerated competitor, but for the Ducks’ apparent ascension to the titles the University of Southern California held every season since 2002: The Pac-10 Championship and an invitation to the Bowl Championship Series, a vague, ultimately unfulfilling collection of contests between supposedly the best schools in the country. Let there be no doubt: This was a permanent changing of the guard, not just a Mass, but a burial of the Dynasty that had haunted and struck fear into people for so long.
It is survived by 39 players who graduated to play in the National Football League and fans including Will Ferrell and Snoop Dogg.
Services are expected to be held at the Holiday Bowl, being held at Jack Murphy Stadium in San Diego, on December 29. No word yet on how many people will care to show up.