We, who are about to die, salute you.
In ancient history, Gladiators uttered these last words as they fought for their lives. Condemned criminals and prisoners of war, Gladiators fought until they were either granted their freedom, or killed for sport. Gladiators entered the Roman Colosseum understanding they had an opportunity to write their own history, while knowing they were walking into almost certain death.
No stadium name in college football evokes emotion quite like the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Like it’s counterpart in Ancient Rome, opponents can’t help but enter the Coliseum with a sense of their own imminent despair.
Nevermind that the Colosseum was built under the Roman Empire, and not the City of Troy. Forget that Trojans and Romans lived over 1,000 years apart from each other. Disregard that the legend of Troy is most likely more mythical than historical. The only connection between Troy and Rome, mythical or otherwise, is Rome’s namesake and first king Romulus. According to legend, Romulus’ bloodline can be traced back to King Priam, the Trojan King who watched his city burn down in the Trojan War.
As fascinating as Greek Mythology is, and it really is fascinating, this isn’t AP European History.This is college football, and we’re not here to parse through what’s factional and what’s fictional when it comes to the Trojans of old. Ironically, the fact that the legend of Troy has outgrown history almost makes the Trojans the perfect moniker for the University of Southern California.
No program is the flagship of their conference like USC is for the PAC 12. The BIG XII has both Texas and Oklahoma. Even with the current state of affairs in Ann Arbor, Michigan and Ohio State are both the face of the Big 10. Alabama has dominated the SEC, and the entire country, for almost the last ten years, but four schools have won ten total national championships in that conference just this century. The closest thing to USC in any conference is probably either Florida State or Miami in the ACC, and they’re both getting punked by a receivers coach at a school that’s not even in the populated part of SOUTH CAROLINA.
Southern California’s toughest competition in the PAC 12 is a track school, a couple basketball schools, Yale with better weather, a gymnastics school, and some public institutions that have top notch rowing programs. USC has won eleven national championships in football, the other eleven teams only have ten national championships combined. The last time a PAC 12 team won the national championship that wasn’t USC was Colorado in 1990. They weren’t even in the PAC 12 at the time. The last time someone from USC’s conference, or yet alone their time zone, won the Consensus National Championship was Stanford in 1927. Read that again, the last time a school USC directly competed against won the national championship was ninety two years ago. The AP poll wouldn’t even be around for another ten seasons, Stanford was determined the national champion by something called the Dickinson System.
Southern California has produced *seven Heisman winners in their history. The other elven schools have five Heisman winners between them, and no school has more than one winner. That means half of the PAC 12 has never produced a Heisman winner and USC has seven, which is tied for the most all time nationally. USC has also had over five hundred players drafted into the NFL, which is the most out of any program in the country. The next closest in the PAC 12 is UCLA with three hundred and twenty two, almost two hundred players less than Southern California.
The fact that USC is one of the five best football programs in history and everyone else in the conference just happens to have a football team isn’t new. Even if we wipe the slate clean and don’t let the Trojan’s storied history affect our opinion of the flagship program of the West Coast, we only need to look at Geography and USC should still be the most dominant program in the country. (This metric asks for an explanation of UCLA’s issues, but that’s an article for a different day.)
USC is in downtown Los Angeles, which is the capital of high school football on the west coast. In the 2018 recruiting class there were thirty nine players from the state of California in 247’s top 300, thirty two of those players were in Southern California. The other states in the conference had a combined fourteen players in the top 300, Oregon and Utah were tied for the lead with four players from each state making the list.
That USC has backyard access to eight times the amount of top 300 players in the country than anyone else in their conference is simply absurd. Atlanta has six Power 5 programs within a three hour drive, and that’s not even counting the Florida schools. Texas recruits aren’t in one central area, but all over the state, from Midland to Marshall. The closest thing in terms of the combination of a loaded recruiting base and geographic isolation would be Miami. Even in Miami’s case only slightly more than half of Florida’s top 300 recruits were from South Florida, not anywhere close to the 82% clip Southern California has.
Even with weather, USC has an advantage over most of the conference. The Arizona schools are hot as h*ll, Utah and Colorado get snow as early as September, and in Oregon and Washington the sun barely even comes out.
Geographic isolation, program history, weather, fertile recruiting grounds are all significant but can be overcome by other programs. What cannot be overcome, no matter how good of a recruiter your head coach is, or how many players your school is putting into the NFL, or how many conference championships your winning, is if a kid has dreamed of playing football for a certain university since they first buckled their chinstrap.
If you grow up in Louisiana you want to be a Tiger, and if you grow up in Southern California you want to be a Trojan, sometimes it’s as simple as that.
A PAC 12 assistant coach, who spoke under anonymity, told a story about just how badly kids want to go to USC that grow up in Southern California. After USC parted ways with Steve Sarkisian Clay Helton was the interim coach the rest of that year, it wasn’t until after the season that he was given the full time job. A Southern California area player who the coach was recruiting told the coach he was committing to USC. The coach, who I’m sure was frustrated and confused, reminded the player that USC didn’t even have a head coach. The kids reply was just “Coach, they’re USC, they’re gonna get someone good and be fine.”
What other school can pitch a recruit “hey, we have absolutely no one in charge right now and no direction of the program but you should still play for us” and IT WORKS?
I spoke to a former coach who worked under Pete Carroll at USC, and was blown away at the borderline arrogance USC had with their recruiting philosophy. When the Trojans were rolling under Peter Carroll they would just wait until signing day and then steal recruits from other programs just so USC wouldn’t have to play against them.
“That’s what we used to do, I’d sit in meetings the night before signing day and it’d be like ‘alright we got three (scholarships) left, we missed on a kid from Florida, Tennessee and New Jersey, who can we go get? Okay let’s get the best guy from UCLA so we never have to play against him.’
“That was Garrett Green. Garrett Green would have started for (UCLA head coach) Rick Neuheisel at quarterback. But we stole him, and he ended up playing wide receiver for us cause we didn’t want to have to play him.”
Put yourself in Rick Neuheisel’s shoes and imagine your quarterback of the future flipping commitments to your rival because he got a last minute offer to play wide receiver. Not even playing quarterback, he’d rather play receiver at USC than quarterback at UCLA. Picture yourself as Neuheisel hearing that and not throwing your phone into Manhattan Beach.
A top ranked Los Angeles kid not playing for the Trojans used to be as big of a surprise as there is in recruiting. I remember when I was in elementary school reading in Sports Illustrated about a five star kid named Desean Jackson (insert link) from LA powerhouse Long Beach Poly who choose to play for the Cal Bears instead of USC in 2005 and it was as monstrous a recruiting upset as anyone could remember.
Flash forward to the 2019 recruiting class and all sorts of schools are coming in and convincing Southern California kids to leave home. Oregon had the highest rated recruiting class in the PAC 12 this season, while USC finished fourth. As crazy as that is when you take a step back and think about it, it gets even worse for the Trojans. Even if we only count Southern California recruits, Oregon still had a higher rated class than USC. The University of Southern California got out recruited in Southern California by a track school in a rainy town called Eugene where no one has seen the sun in years.
One recruit Oregon didn’t get over USC was St John Bosco (Bellflower, CA) quarterback DJ Uiagalelei. USC didn’t get him either, but for their sakes he didn’t go to Oregon. The top ranked quarterback in the 2020 recruiting class, who’s high school is less than thirty minutes in LA traffic from the Coliseum, had a top six list of schools that included Oregon, Oklahoma, three SEC schools, and Clemson where he ultimately committed.
Upon being asked why Uiagalelei didn’t include the Trojans in his list, he cited that he wanted to play the best football in the country, and the best football isn’t being played in Southern California right now.
Reading that should make USC fans dry heave, former players pissed off, and administration run to their phone to call someone to do something, anything! No program is going to get every player they want, but for USC to lose out on the top quarterback in the class who grew up down the road because they aren’t playing at a high enough level is disheartening, and frankly, embarrassing.
That’s not to say USC isn’t dead in the water. Just a few weeks ago Mater Dei (Santa Ana, CA) quarterback Bryce Young who had been committed to USC for months decommitted and flipped to Alabama. The next day, twenty four hours later, they got a commitment from five star 2021 quarterback Jake Garcia (Harbor City, CA). Garcia, rated currently as the third best pro style quarterback in the country, is arguably an upgrade from Young.
Now Garcia and Young aren’t in the same recruiting class, Young is a 2020 recruit, and most programs want to get at least one quarterback in every recruiting class. So a Young for Garcia trade isn’t exactly an even trade. It does show, however, that even with everything going on with the program USC should still be able to run Southern California recruiting.
I’ve never had to walk into the Coliseum as an opponent, but until this year I hadn’t even been as a spectator. I bought tickets to the game against 10th ranked Utah because, if nothing else, I needed to see this true freshman quarterback Kedon Slovis with my own eyes.
Slovis ended up being just about the only thing I didn’t end up seeing, ironically, as he exited early with an injury. Utah walked into the Coliseum as the 10th ranked team in the country and the most talented team in school history. Reports were being floated around that if/when Utah embarrassed USC then Clay Helton would be immediately relieved of his coaching duties. The defending division champions were facing a true freshman, a team coming off a bad overtime loss to BYU, and a coach with so little job security I’m amazed he’d made it that far.
What was supposed to be Utah’s first win ever at the Coliseum, and Clay Helton’s last day on the job, turned into a 30-23 USC upset win. USC turned to Jr. quarterback Matt Fink when Slovis had to come out of the game early. Fink, who came out of fall camp as the fourth string quarterback, and the best receiving corps this side of Alabama made Utah’s secondary look like a practice squad. What could have been coach Helton’s last loss, ended up being one of his biggest wins.
An upset win at home over a top 10 team would be the highlight of a great year for most programs. At USC, though, conference wins at home in week 4 should be expected more than celebrated. In Los Angeles anything less than a conference championship and being in the discussion for the Playoff is living below their means.
That’s the expectation year in and year out for USC football. Even if those are unrealistic expectations for a fanbase, that’s just soft of what you sign up for when you’re playing at the Coliseum. At the end of the day, the Trojans have only won one conference championship and one Rose Bowl victory since Pete Carroll departed for the NFL. For a program with more history, natural recruiting base, and resources than really anyone in the country that isn’t good enough.
It hasn’t been all bad since Carroll left, but “not terrible” is far below what USC should be. USC needs to look in the mirror and ask themselves, “what’s our deal?”
*This figure includes Reggie Bush’s Heisman award that was later taken away by the NCAA
-By Jake Cowden