Nothing Special
Posted by EstablishTheRun | Filed under Failing To Deliver, Media Bias, Running Game
That’s how the Boyish One described USC’s performance last Saturday in our over-hyped matchup with Ohio State. For once Pete and I couldn’t agree more.
For those of us who demand excellence from Mr. $4.4 million there was nothing special about the Men of Troy hanging less than 40 points on a defense missing TWO starters from last year’s team, at home, on national television. ‘Special’ isn’t a word I would use to describe a punchless running attack that never found paydirt, only averaged a little over five yards a carry, and did nothing to resolve the Trojans’ crippling running back controversy (more on this in a later post).
This game represented an unprecedented opportunity for Coach Carroll to tell an indifferent nation that USC was back, and that after three frustrating years in the cellar of the Bowl Championship Series, we deserve another chance in the big show, a chance to play for the ADT Security Services National Championship Trophy rather than have to settle for another[1] irrelevant engraving on an ancient trophy from yesteryear’s formerly prestigious Rose Bowl game.
Saturday night the Trojans had a golden opportunity to show the voters that our team was up for the challenge, that USC deserved to hoist Waterford Crystal high above their sweaty brows once again. We had a chance to make the case for poll unanimity, instead of enduring another week of embarrassment as Georgia, Oklahoma, and Florida steal four of our first place votes. It was a fleeting opportunity to step onto the national stage and make a statement–surely the only one our too-easy schedule[2] afforded. But what did Pete decide to do? He decided to pull a Sarah Palin and try to gain supporters by affecting a ‘regular joe’ persona and appearing to coach a ‘normal’ team. “Hey Joe Person, sports reporter for The State, South Carolina’s largest newspaper! Don’t resent the Trojans, or regard them as somehow better than you. We’re just like your beloved two loss Gamecocks. Remember how Gamecock quarterback Chris Smelley threw a pick at Georgia’s three-yard line with less than a minute remaining costing you a chance to send an unexpectedly close game against a top-ranked bitter rival to overtime? Don’t worry, the exact same thing happened to us—didn’t you see Mark Sanchez almost cost us the game by throwing a pick in the Ohio State endzone? We’re just like you, Joe, so much so that our school’s have the same acronym.”
Maybe Pete thought he would offend people if the Trojans scored more than four touchdowns on offense. Pandering shamelessly to the rampant anti-elitism of the American public, Pete decided it was best to show the nation that we were just another team. Pretty good perhaps. Maybe even talented. But certainly nothing ’special.’ Leave special to the Barack Obamas and Florida Gators of the world; USC and Palin, we’re sticking with 35 points and moose huntin’.
I guess Hollywood Pete’s a ‘Hockey Coach’ now. Maybe we should buy him some lipstick.
USC only converted one more 3rd down than the Buckeyes (playing without their Heisman favorite running back) and only 50% of our third downs overall. Maybe 50% used to be a passing grade at the ‘University of Spoiled Children,’ but ever since Steve Sample arrived at USC (an otherwise brilliant school president, despite his disturbing devotion to Pete “4 times his salary for 1 BCS title every 7 years” Carroll) our academic standards have been on the rise. We’re a top tier[3] educational institution now, and that means 50% is a failing grade.
Look, I know we won. That’s good. I’ve been around USC football long enough to remember what it feels like to lose a lot, so I can’t argue with a ‘W’. But a win is not a win, not always, and certainly not last Saturday.
Consider this: the line on the game was USC 11+. Did we beat the spread? Obviously. But only by 3 touchdowns and it took almost the whole first half. We only beat the Suckeyes by 32 points! Everyone knows we could have hung 50. Incredibly, Chris Fowler and the Gameday crew seem to think this mediocrity speaks in our favor because we were “playing within ourselves” and “didn’t break a sweat”. Since when do we pay Carroll his trillions of dollars to hand out antiperspirant? Don’t we want our players to sweat? Don’t we want them giving 110%?
Maybe Coach Carroll didn’t think he needed a 110% effort in the biggest game of the season. I hate to think how much he’ll demand of his players against Washington State or Arizona. 20%? 30?
This week saw the tragic suicide of one of literature’s greatest lights who never gave less than 110%: David Foster Wallace. In honor of him, I leave you with the following passage. In it, he describes his emotional state during his first (and presumably last) luxury cruise experience.
There’s something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that’s unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes yet simple in its effect: on board the [cruise ship] (especially at night, when all the ship’s structured fun and reassurances and gaiety ceased) I felt despair. The word “despair” is overused and banalized now, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. It’s close to what people call dread or angst, but it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable sadness of knowing I’m small and weak and selfish and going, without doubt, to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard.
Feeling hopeless during a supposedly ‘perfect’ experience… sound familiar?
I can’t think of a better description of the Pete Carroll era.
1. BACK Under Pete Carroll we’ve already won the Rose Bowl three times, a clear indication of the diminished state of the ‘Granddaddy of Them All.” Each of those years, we could have been playing for the National Championship if not for Pete’s boneheaded play-calling: 2003 - Hershel Dennis gets the ball on 2nd and three? Why not put the game in the hands of the squad’s two future Heisman winners? (Same thing he did in the Texas game) 2006 - our epic choke jobs against Oregon State and the hated Bruins, including 3 straight passes in the redzone against Fucla (a game in which we only put up NINE points but after which, all the blame was put on Lane Kiffin, not Pete Carroll. I think Kiffin’s performance as the not-fired head coach of the NFL Oakland Raiders proves it was Pete who was out of ideas) and, most egregiously, in 2007 - when he clearly under-prepared John David Booty (who would have won a Heisman playing for Les Miles) for playing through throwing hand injuries and apparently didn’t learn a thing from the Vince Young debacle when he let Dennis Dixon, a college football footnote who came in fifth in the Heisman voting that year, run for 76 yards and a touchdown.
2. BACK Why are we still playing Notre Dame?!! I’m all for tradition, but to waste one of our precious non-conference games on a perennial powder puff simply because we’ve played them for 82 years and a sparkly war club is on the line is exactly the kind of hide-bound goosestepping that has made teams like the Irish, Michigan, and Penn State (with their reanimated corpse of a coach) so moribund, so irrelevant in today’s college football landscape. We play in a patsy conference, it’s imperative that we schedule non-conference heavyweights if we’re gonna have a prayer to end up in a BCS title game. Otherwise the loaded SEC’s titanic weekly matchups will continue to tilt an already East Coast-biased media even further towards the South Eastern Conference’s best and brightest, while we end up playing in another meaningless Rose Bowl against some Big 10 embarrassment.
3. BACK True story: I was an RA at USC as we climbed the college rankings and became an elite university. One year, at a conference, a resident advisor from Stanford (whom Pete has lost twice to, both times at home) told USC RA’s that as our school’s academic standards rose we in the RA community should prepare for a concomitant rise in attempted suicides. We asked them why this was so, and they informed us that smarter students are more prone to depression and experience less social cohesion. MIT regularly has to lock the stairwells and patrol the campus looking for jumpers during its finals week, while students attending a university with lax academic standards like infamous party school Arizona State are more socially adept and feel less pressure to succeed and, subsequently, far less stress. It’s an interesting theory, but I couldn’t help but think that when several of our young freshman attempted suicide my dorm it was because USC got its ass handed to them by K-State and could only manage a paltry Orange Bowl berth and uninspired 38-17 victory over a Big 10 clown (the first of Pete’s four BCS bowl victories over Big 10 opponents that are inexplicably regarded as ‘achievements’ by the press and the Pete Carroll fanboys despite the fact that we let each of these Big 10 opponents score upwards of one touchdown and didn’t score 50 points in any of the games).
Tags: BCS, Chris Fowler, David Foster Wallace, Ohio State, Rose Bowl, Sarah Palin