Musings from Arledge: USC's bowl opponent and the College Football Playoff

Some people say it’s just time to get out of the dark ages, Trojans. College football has moved on from your silly traditions, and you’ll just have to like it. And it’s true that some of the best traditions are just gone: Nebraska doesn’t play Oklahoma, Bama no longer gets every break possible break from the voters, USC doesn’t like to run the ball now, and UCLA almost never plays in bowl games. (Three bowls in nine years, Bruins?! Holy smokes. I’m starting to wonder about you guys.) 

But it’s not as if all traditions are gone. Tragically, some of the worst remain. Notre Dame is still rigging its schedule to get a shot at the title. (The Irish are about to play game 13 and still will have played only three true road games—and that’s counting the trip down the street to play woeful Purdue!) 

And USC now faces the king of odd and unfortunate traditions, the Texas A&M Aggies. Somebody should offer a justification for this monstrosity, which appears to be a well-coordinated campaign against masculinity. https://youtu.be/EHokAV9Wjrc 

And the Aggies are apparently also doing this, which looks like a tradition that began the night the Hitler Youth found the commandant’s stash of Jägermeister, got sloshed, and watched It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. 

Now I don’t want to beat up on the Aggies. Well, maybe I do. Here’s the thing, though: while I know many Aggies, and many of them seem like very solid people, I’ve never been to College Station to see them in their element. Sometimes weird places are best viewed from afar, and Texas A&M seems like a very weird place.

It’s also a place that is tailor-made for a powerhouse college football program. It sits in a prime recruiting area. It has a rabid fan base. It has plenty of oil money to grease the recruiting wheels; indeed, the whole NIL craze kicked off with Texas A&M buying the best recruiting class in history, driving Nick Saban out of college football. Nick is an old-school coach and didn’t like college football’s new direction. He only wanted to coach in a world where it was still enough to have the local Tide fanatic at Bubba’s Used Cars give a Dodge Charger to every key recruits.  

So Texas A&M should be great at football. And frequently people think they will be. But the Aggies are college football’s version of Hoosier’s Shooter Flatch: just when things seem to be going really well, they come in staggering and stumbling, screaming their fool head off, humiliate themselves, and everybody just has to move on without them. 

So USC now plays in the Underachiever Bowl against college football’s biggest traditional underachiever, Texas A&M. This is a program that has parlayed every natural advantage a program could have into exactly two seasons in the last 30 years where they lost two or less games. One of those was a shortened Covid season, so I’m not sure it counts. The other was the Johnny Manziel season, where the Shooter Flatch program of college football had one of its greatest seasons ever behind the strong arm of, well, the Shooter Flatch of college football quarterbacks. 

When those two seasons are your highlights, you really need to have a built-in excuse—like we’re the only school that cares about academics in the entire SEC (Vandy) or somebody had the terrible idea to place this school in Corvallis (Oregon State). But if you’re sitting in the middle of Texas oil fields and you have many tens of thousands of torch-wielding weirdos rooting you on, that’s just unacceptable.

None of this means, of course, that USC is going to win this bowl game. It’s hard to bet on USC beating anybody these days. Besides, nobody, including Lincoln Riley, has any idea who’s actually going to play in this game. Lower-tier bowl games are essentially spring scrimmages against another program. They’re great if you want to see the young guys play. But everybody involved—including the players—knows that they don’t really mean much of anything.

At least the game is in Vegas. We know the Trojans play well there. Sadly, what happens in Vegas also tends to stay in Vegas.

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A few thoughts on the college football playoff. 

Twelve teams is too many. When the committee is trying to decide whether to admit a two-loss SMU team whose best win is against lowly UNLV or an Alabama team that lost to Vanderbilt and scored three points against one of the worst OU teams in recent memory, we’re letting in too many teams. Eight is enough.

Boise State as a three seed? Come on, people. Let’s act like we’re serious for a minute. 

Don’t get me wrong: I’d love for Boise to win it all. But that’s silly. The only people who think Boise State can win this playoff are cult members who are convinced that aliens are about to come and take their group to paradise tonight or the kind of guy who writes into next month’s budget the anticipated $10,000 in winning from the state lottery. Or people who still believed at the end of last year that Alex Grinch’s defense might get a stop or two. Serious people know better.

If you want to root against the SEC, Ohio State, and Notre Dame—and you should—then you’re really left with only a couple of options. You have Indiana. Indiana hasn’t really beaten anybody, and while I’d love for the Hoosiers to do it, Cinderella’s spell won’t last nearly long enough. That’s not a team that’s good enough to win out. 

Obviously, if you’re a 15-year-old kid whose memory stretches back only to last month, and if you’re awed and excited by hundreds of costume combinations, you have your team.  

Which isn’t to say that you have to be a kid to like Oregon. You can be an adult who really loves the current state of college football; that is, if you like how college football has become completely mercenary with an unregulated free agency culture and no regard for tradition, loyalty, or academics—if you think it’s awesome that a single billionaire can first acquire a university and then completely upset the college football world by giving out vast sums of money to 18-year-old kids, knowing that in most cases the story will end in bankruptcy and substance abuse—then you should also root for Oregon, the poster child for everything that is wrong with modern college football. 

But if you’re a normal person who just wants a non-terrible outcome, I guess you can pull for Penn State and Clemson. Penn State has its own sordid history, but it beats watching the Irish or Buckeyes win it, so I’ll just have to swallow my distaste. And Clemson is the anti-Oregon. I can’t get excited about any season where USC goes 6-6. But we can do worse than a Clemson title. 

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There’s already much going on in the transfer portal, but we just don’t have enough information right now to say much meaningful. The only thing we know for sure is that USC will have to make an enormous splash in the portal to have any chance at a successful 2025 season. Let’s hope House of Victory is ready to spend.