IMHO Sunday: Beware the Ides of October and November

In my humble opinion, cardinal and gold thoughts on what I see, what I hear, and what I think from Los Angeles: The schedule: The first half of the 2023 USC regular season football schedule - with a bye week thrown in after the third game – is a sequence of six games (San Jose St, Nevada, Stanford, at ASU, at Colorado, and Arizona) in which the Men of Troy will be heavy favorites – perhaps naming the score at their discretion in some of them. However, the sequence of the remaining six games, which includes Notre Dame in South Bend - is going to be a major heavy lift even with the return of 2022 Heisman Trophy winning quarterback Caleb Williams. The schedule – Part 2: Granted the Pac-12 has no say in the placement of the 2023 Notre Dame game on the schedule (Oct. 14), there was, however, always a sense of uneasiness that the Pac-12 would stick it to USC for leaving to the Big Ten in 2024. Is it a schedule coincidence that following the Irish, the Trojans return home to face the two-time defending Pac-12 champions Utah Utes? Utah currently has a three-game winning streak over the Trojans dating back to 2021. That middle part of the October schedule could be feast or famine for the Trojans, leading into a very challenging November. Shakespeare wrote in Julius Caesar, “Beware the Ides of March.” If Shakespeare were covering the Trojans as a journalist, he might be foreshadowing the season by writing “beware the Ides of October and especially November.”