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.