For anyone who follows college football on the West Coast, we enter the season with a decidedly different feeling than in years past.
The foundation for excellence put forth by USC will likely crack, but won’t crumble. The Trojans lose back-to-back Heisman Trophy winners Matt Leinart and Reggie Bush, LenDale White and a host of other players who were much better than their UCLA counterparts.
Over the last three years, USC has won 23 consecutive conference games and two national titles, in what has been a pretty top-heavy Pac-10 field of competition. While the SEC and the ACC have only gotten stronger, the Pac-10 has changed – and not necessarily for the better.
While Pete Carroll has built USC into the premier program in the country, the Pac-10 has developed a gap between the good programs and the bad ones. And that gap is still growing. USC has just flattened everybody with superior talent, plain and simple. Meanwhile, Jeff Tedford has quickly turned California into the second-best in the West, and these two schools are running away with the entire Pac-10.
There’s no doubt that the success of USC and Cal has increased the national exposure of every other team in the conference. But that exposure isn’t always a good thing. It’s not good for UCLA to give up over 100 yards to Reggie Bush in the first quarter of a nationally televised game only a couple of weeks after Fresno State almost beat the Trojans at the L.A. Coliseum.
It’s not good for Stanford to lose to UC Davis when Cal is winning between 8 and 10 games every year.
Tedford’s rise at Berkeley aptly defines the shift in the conference. When he left Oregon as offensive coordinator to become head coach at Cal, he took with him that offensive magic that spits out NFL quarterbacks.
The Trojans, meanwhile, still have too much talent to completely fall apart and lose four or five games, and they still walk around with their chins held a little too high.
“Losing a Heisman winner has happened to us before,” USC senior center Ryan Kalil said at Pac-10 Media Day. “We know we have guys that are going to rise to the challenge. I think one of the things that has made us so great as a unit has been our depth, but I see us being just as dominant as before with the people we have coming in.”
An overachieving Pac-10 team is ripe to wallop them with a surprise uppercut, and deliver the Trojans a two-, maybe three-loss season. But if that doesn’t happen and we are sitting around watching John David Booty at the Heisman ceremony at the end of the season, then it is finally time to stop complaining about the East Coast media bias and just accept that the Pac-10 is probably the least competitive, top to bottom, of the BCS conferences, the Big East notwithstanding.
So, who could be the teams that might bring USC back to Earth and keep Cal from being undefeated?
Washington State has been on a steady decline since Mike Price left for Alabama and allegedly decided to celebrate his new hiring with a room full of strippers.
The Washington program is a sleeping giant, a once-proud program in a rich recruiting area with all the infrastructure to win. But in 2006, it would be a stretch for them to win two conference games.
Mike Stoops looks like he has Arizona headed back to respectability, but in-state rival Dirk Koetter is a coach who always has Arizona State on the brink of big things and doesn’t quite deliver. Let’s call the desert schools a wash.
How does UCLA factor into all of this? Well, it’s still very murky. Karl Dorrell could really emerge as the big winner if the Bruins have another 9- or 10-win season this year or next year. If that happens, the Bruins will have established themselves as one of the three major players in the Pac-10. But it’s up in the air.
Dorrell couldn’t net a juggernaut recruiting class because the prospects are still waiting to see what happens. The prep prospects don’t care about tradition; they want to play for a winner and go to the next level. That’s why Carroll and Tedford are still outrecruiting the rest of the Pac-10.