USC Loses to Oregon State; College Football’s Golden Ticket Up for Grabs
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↵Get me a dead mule and a piano. Throw a few melting clocks on the wall, and start handing out pointy mustaches for everyone. This season is brought to you by Salvador Dali and the surrealist movement, and their opening masterstroke is having seemingly invincible USC face 1-2 Oregon State and an unstoppable 5’7” freshman running back, losing 27-21 in Corvallis, and thus throwing the entire season into colorful absurdist chaos. ↵↵The Trojans lost at the lines, where the interior of USC’s defense was swallowed up by superior Beaver blocking -- that’s surreal enough given USC’s vaunted three-deep depth chart and bottomless well of talent. Losing it mentally is another, as the Trojans committed crucial penalties and turned the ball over when it mattered most. And even stranger was losing it to an Oregon State team who, prior to this, you may have recognized from its roles as whipping boy to Penn State and loser to Stanford. (Well, that’s something USC and Oregon State have in common now, eh? Losing to Stanford, that is.) ↵
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↵The sublimely weird part came with the sudden appearance of Jacquizz Rodgers, a self-described "small dude" who at 5'7" spent most of the night hiding behind Oregon State's beefy line and eking out crucial yards for the Oregon State offense. 37 carries for 186 yards against the defense and 2 TDs were the totals, all delivered through the heart of a Trojan defense that looked nigh-impregnable against Ohio State. The Trojans spotted Oregon State 21 points, and then dared the Beavers to hang on as they pulled back to 21-14 in the third quarter. Then, just as the usual script dictated that USC would kick into gear and rip off 21 unanswered points in a flurry of big plays and turnovers, Mark Sanchez threw three straight incompletions, handed the ball and the momentum back to Oregon State, and sent the entire season into Twin Peaks-level weirdness. ↵
↵↵This leads us down the rabbit-hole and into the real heat of the season now, a place filled with all sorts of troubling questions to ponder. Does USC have real fundamental problems along the defensive interior? Do they have a true offensive gamebreaker? Is Ohio State even worse than you imagined? Given the roadslaughter Oregon State endured versus Penn State, are the Nittany Lions even better than previously thought? At this point, does Erin Andrews require her own armed guard to protect her from fans? Is “Mark Sanchez” merely Spanish for “John David Booty Part Two”? Do we get to type the name Jacquizz a lot? (I hope so ... that’s a magnificent beast of a moniker.) ↵
↵↵And given this, what excuse do you have to not watch every single game involving a ranked team this weekend? Your Homeland Security Weirdness Index just went up to Paisley. There’s no excuse not to strap on a melting clock and watch games like TCU/Oklahoma ... at least, not when the season just put on a Willy Wonka hat and told USC “You get nothing! YOU LOSE! Good day, sir!” College football’s Golden Ticket is therefore officially up for grabs, and there’s no knowing where we’re going from here. ↵
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This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.
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