Baxter’s scrimmage run making impact on YouTube


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With the arrival of spring practice, a new coach, and a highly touted recruiting class, anticipation is building for next season’s Trojan football team.

After a disappointing 2009 campaign, Trojan fans hope the team can return to its Pac-10 championship-winning ways.  As has been the case since his departure in 2005, anticipation has been building as the team looks for the next Reggie Bush.

For the last three seasons, this pressure mostly fell on Joe McKnight’s shoulders.  McKnight was productive but fumble prone in his three seasons at SC, and he never became the game changing force everyone predicted upon his arrival.

With McKnight gone, Trojans fans appear to have bestowed the “Next Reggie Bush” title on freshman running back Dillon Baxter.

Baxter made headlines with a fifty yard run in a scrimmage during saturday’s practice that coach Lane Kiffin described as “like Reggie Bush’s against Fresno State in 2005.”  Baxter took a simple handoff left and turned it into gold, making five tacklers miss on the way to the end zone, including one defender who missed twice.

The video of the play has already gotten 1,317,000 plus views in less than a week, which only serves to increase the hype.  Baxter made more headlines when Kiffin explored the Wildcat offense with him at quarterback this week.

Baxter was the starting quarterback at Mission Bay high school in San Diego; a hometown which, as many writers have noted, he also shares with Bush and Marcus Allen, two Hiesman-winning running backs at USC.  While Baxter may become the next Bush, the next McKnight or the next five star bust, none can say for sure, but highlights like that one will certainly make it enjoyable to watch.