Neither UCLA nor USC has had the sort of season fans of both teams were expecting in August, when the Bruins and Trojans opened the 2015 season as consensus top-15 outfits. That doesn't mean the battle for the Victory Bell, a de facto play-in game for the Pac-12 Championship Game, won't be a barnburner.
UCLA vs. USC 2015: Start time, live stream, TV schedule and 3 things to know
The winner’s heading to the Pac-12 title game.
Since August, UCLA has been up and down, losing lopsided games to Arizona State and Stanford, but also knocking off ranked Cal and Utah teams on either side of a close loss to Washington State. USC, which fired head coach Steve Sarkisian in October after a messy start to its season, appeared to have rallied around interim head coach Clay Helton, clicking off four straight wins -- but then the Trojans got vivisected by Oregon last Saturday.
So, no, neither of these teams is playing for a College Football Playoff berth or anything like that. But all but one of their combined six conference losses came to Pac-12 North teams, leaving the Bruins and Trojans tied atop the Pac-12 South. Saturday's victor will play for a Pac-12 title, and an improbable Rose Bowl appearance.
This new chapter of their heated rivalry is about more than winning that Victory Bell.
How to watch, stream and listen
TV: 3:30 ET, ABC/ESPN2
Online streaming: WatchESPN
Spread: USC is favored by three points.
Make friends: Get to SB Nation’s team blog chats for this game at Bruins Nation (for UCLA fans) and Conquest Chronicles (for USC fans).
Three big things to know
1. Rosen up your fiddle, boy. UCLA’s Josh Rosen looked like a potential Heisman winner after his spectacular debut (350 passing yards, three TDs) against Virginia in September. Since then, he looked much more like a typical true freshman, completing better than 58 percent of his passes just three times in the Bruins’ last 10 games. But Rosen hasn’t thrown an interception since October 15, and USC’s pass defense is No. 106 nationally. The freshman could feast.
2. Can UCLA keep Jim Mora’s rivalry record perfect? When Mora was hired after the 2011 season, he became the Bruins’ head coach just weeks after an embarrassing 50-0 loss to USC that was the biggest beatdown in the rivalry’s history since 1930. But UCLA is 3-0 when the Victory Bell’s on the line under Mora, with all three wins coming by double digits. The Trojans are favored on Saturday, so we’ll see if that run of success continues.
3. Helton’s audition. Clay Helton has served as USC’s interim head coach twice now, leading the Trojans to a win in the 2013 Las Vegas Bowl in relief of Ed Orgeron (and thus also Lane Kiffin) and piloting them well this fall since Sarkisian’s firing. A loss to UCLA might confirm that Helton doesn’t deserve to lose that interim tag, and would all but formally open one of the nation’s most attractive jobs to the college football coaching community.
But a win might be different, especially given those last three years of momentum, the turnaround from last Saturday in Autzen Stadium, and the Pac-12 title game berth. A win could re-establish Helton as a legitimate candidate to be the Trojans’ full-fledged head coach.
So it’s a safe bet that more than a few agents will be quietly hoping that the team in powder blue prevails: Chaos is what gets coaches paid.
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