Dan Weber of the Press-Enterprise has a few quick and interesting thoughts about last night’s ucla win over Tennessee.
Ask the Trojans and they'll tell you it's never about anybody else, always just about themselves and what they do with their program.
Only it's not. Not when you're as competitive as Pete Carroll is. Not when competition is your lifeblood.
And not when whatever goes right across town will ultimately be pegged to the work of two former USC assistants -- Norm Chow and Dewayne Walker.
The better UCLA does on offense, no matter how many players it loses, puts the hat on the Trojans to keep their offense at the level it showed Saturday at Virginia.
No more just getting along as the Trojans did with a conservative, show-up-some-weeks, just-try-no-t-to-get-beat offense of the past two years.
There are lots of reasons why USC's offense looks so different from a year ago, and if you don't think the return of Chow to LA isn't one of them, you just don't understand how competition works...
I see where Weber is coming from but frankly I am ambivalent. There is a difference between what the program thinks and what the fans think. As fans we ONLY care about USC. I understand that there are those who are concerned about how the conference performs on a whole and that’s fine but for the most part I don’t pay a whole lot of attention to other teams in the Pac-10 and I wouldn’t expect them to pay attention to USC.
It has been interesting to read some of the stories about this game and about the genius that is Norm Chow while hardly hearing a word about DeWayne Walker’s defense that kept ucla in the game. I finally got to see the first half this afternoon.
This was an UGLY game!
Here are some numbers:
31 rushes for 29 yards, for a 0.9 yard average
74 plays for 288 yards, for a 3.9-yard avg.
I guess that’s lighting it up…
The reason that most USC fans don’t care is because… IT’S. JUST. ONE. GAME.
Sure, you could say that it was an amazing win. I mean it’s an instant classic on ESPN, right?
I wrote this today in the comments of this FanPost.
[...] if anyone took the time to read up on the game you would have found that UT was going to have a very tough time winning this game comfortably, if at all. There were just too many little things adding up that made this a difficult game for UT.
- New offensive coordinator…bringing in a new system
- New QB…playing in a new system
- On the road…against very good defense, hyped up crowd etc. etc.
I have no idea why everyone thought this was going to be a UT blow out. The guys in Vegas set the line was at 7 and seeing that they kind of do this for a living they seem to get it right most of the time. All this talk about a double digit win was way over blown.
Should we be surprised that ucla won?
In a word...
No!
You could have seen this coming a mile a way, as the stars lined up perfectly.
If Pete Carroll and his staff care about what happens across town then that's fine with me. If it keeps them motivated to always want to be better and achieve great things then that's fine with me too. But I'm not sure that a lot of USC fans care when ucla has such a long way to go to get our level regardless of their accomplishments real or imagined.