Ah, memories. This collection seeped into my consciousness when prompted by the discovery that the Oakland Raiders are playing at Houston on Sunday … and remembering I had covered an NFL game in Houston. At the Astrodome. While covering the Los Angeles Rams. In 1978. A long, long time ago. And I was pretty sure […]

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Wow. It had been that long? I covered at least 15 Rose Bowl games, maybe 20, and  should have known this. But I may have mentioned I’ve been away. What I know for sure is that USC is supposed to 1) be in the Rose Bowl more often than this and 2) win the Rose […]

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If it were not already time for this, it certainly is now: We no longer can consider USC a “football” school. Not after what Alabama did to the Trojans in their open tonight … a 52-6 blowout, nationally televised, that made the Trojans look like chumps. Not after compiling a overall record of 57-28 since […]

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Wow. What a mess. USC football may be at a low ebb, at least in this century. The coaches and players who contrived to lose to Wisconsin in the Holiday Bowl tonight constitute a program that is in trouble. The Trojans, over decades, have too often embraced the dim-witted arrogance of the biggest and most […]

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Had not been home during college football season in a long time. So when we settled on this trip to SoCal, I checked the schedules of USC and UCLA. And there it was: USC home to Notre Dame. Even spending only 10 days in Southern California … I wanted to be there.

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American exceptionalism is a fairly controversial political notion, talked about for nearly 200 years, that the United States is unlike any other country in the world due to its “unique” history and form of government. People of good will can be on either side of that discussion. But the U.S. most certainly is exceptional in […]

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Came out of a middle-of-the-night coma long enough, here in the Land on the Other Side of the World, and saw all but 15 points of Super Bowl 48 on some once-only, no-cost streaming video from Fox. Pete Carroll coached the winning Seattle Seahawks team, and he bucked some actuarial odds, and also reached the […]

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It seems silly to have to go back to the records to come up with statistics on your own journalism career, but when you have been around long enough … Five seconds ago I realized that I covered six of the first nine BCS college football championships games. Did I just take a moment and […]

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A weird thing about being in Thailand — which is physically closer to the U.S. than is the UAE, and by several thousand miles — is an even bigger sense of disconnect from American sports. It’s the time zones. By 10 a.m. UAE time, just about every sports event “last night” in the U.S. is […]

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Apparently, I have been gone so long that the notion of USC defeating Stanford, in the Coliseum, is such a surprise that fans flood the field. For most of my life, and we’re talking more than a few decades now, USC beating Stanford was How Things Worked. Football players attended Stanford to have some fun […]

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