USC Football Is Still Hung Over, and There's No Cure in Sight

It's hard to say exactly when USC stopped being USC, but December 6, 2009, is as good a place to start as any.

It was then that the Trojans, who had finished 8-4—the program's first season with more than two losses since 2001—learned that they would be playing Boston College in the Emerald Bowl in San Francisco. From the perspective of a casual college football fan, that was stunning. The Emerald Bowl? Against Boston College? For USC?

Powerhouse programs have off years, and you can do a lot worse than the Emerald Bowl during a downturn—just ask Florida, Ohio State, Alabama, Texas, and Notre Dame, all of which have had six-win-or-worse seasons in the past decade. Thing is, USC didn't have off years.

From 2002 through 2008, USC went 82-9 and made a BCS bowl every season—five Rose Bowls and two Orange Bowls—of which the Trojans won six. They never finished lower than fourth in the final Associated Press poll. Star players like Reggie Bush and Matt Leinart became pop culture celebrities, and the program became Los Angeles' de facto NFL franchise. It's tempting to call USC the Alabama of the aughts, but that would be an undersell. The Trojans were better than the current Crimson Tide dynasty, and it wasn't even that close.

On December 6, 2009, USC's belle époque ended. The Trojans became just another team. A month later, their head coach, Pete Carroll, the most dominant coach of his era, announced he was leaving for the Seattle Seahawks. NCAA sanctions followed, as did Lane Kiffin. And so began a six-year stretch, almost as long as the bygone era of dominance, in which the Trojans have gone 55-26 with no finishes in the top four and no BCS-caliber bowl appearances.

On Saturday, the Trojans squandered a No. 6 ranking in the AP poll and succumbed to Stanford at home, a loss that gives the program absolutely no margin of error for making the College Football Playoff. Once again, USC is looking to the future, desperately hoping for national relevance that was once all but guaranteed.

As is the case with any fallen empire, it's not difficult to find reasons for the collapse. Kiffin proved to be a big mistake, and Steve Sarkisian has been unfulfilling hire, at best. The aforementioned NCAA sanctions, including extremely harsh scholarship losses, undoubtedly took a toll.

Now the question is how USC can rebound, and if they will—and the fact that this has become an "if" is perhaps as shocking as the initial fall. There are some programs with so many built-in advantages that it's almost impossible for them to stay down for very long. They are too big, too storied, too rich to fail. The Trojans fit that bill. In fact, USC might have more going for it than any other school in the country. The Trojans have tradition, a hot home recruiting area, a long record of producing NFL prospects, great academics, better weather, and lots and lots of money.

In college football, where competitive balance is essentially nonexistent, teams with those advantages simply don't lose—or, at least, they don't lose often.

Even more perplexing is that the Trojans seem to be taking advantage of their position. They have good players—quarterback Cody Kessler is criminally underrated—and have had top 10 recruiting classes for four of the past five years, including the second-ranked class nationally in both 2011 and 2015, according to 247 Sports. USC has cemented itself as the dominant West Coast recruiting power. The program may have more young talent than any other school in the country.

Yet somehow, USC just can't keep up with today's elites. Maybe the problem starts at the top, with the hiring of "seven-win Sark." The wrong coach can mismanage even the best situation. Perhaps the issue is simply bad luck: the Bush Push was a long time ago. Whatever the reason, perplexing losses to the likes of Stanford, Utah, and Boston College should have stopped, but they haven't. And that's so unlike the USC college football fans once loved, hated, and feared.

We all know what the program is capable of. That's why a USC team that finished 7-6 in 2012 was ranked No. 1 in the preseason. That's why many experts picked the Trojans to make the playoff this year, even though, three weeks into the season, it's already starting to look like a pipe dream.

USC could be USC again—should be USC again—if only the Trojans could get out of their own way.