Tag Archive for: pac-12

QB battle is a story made for Hollywood


Usually the first game of the season answers questions about a team — it gives the team a chance to forge a sense of identity  and define structural parameters for expectations. When I covered spring practice almost six months ago, few games on the USC schedule mattered as much to me as USC-Hawai’i. The reason […]

Early conference games are not ideal


It always used to go something like this: USC would play two or three nonconference games and then shift over to conference play, not facing an opponent outside of the Pac-10 for the rest of the season, save for Notre Dame. It had a sort of fluidity to it. Though those nonconference games counted in […]

NCAA gets it wrong yet again


June 10, 2010 is when it all started. That was the day the NCAA handed down some of the stiffest and most stringent penalties of all time in its sanctions against the USC football program. That was when I became skeptical about the integrity and questionable motives of the NCAA as an institution. Looking back, […]