O/NSO: What Big Ten fans should know about USC football – Part 1 edition

The Obvious: With the 2024 Big Ten football schedule released last week, the first emotion that may have jumped out to fans of Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Illinois was exhilaration at the thought of “vacationing” in Los Angeles in the fall of 2024 to support their favorite team against the storied USC Trojans. The Not So Obvious: As the Big Ten Conference was enthusiastically pointing out last weekend, other than within the states themselves, there is no bigger Big Ten alumni base in the country than in Southern California. You can understand the energy of Big Ten fans who were hoping their team would be one of the lucky few to be part of the inaugural first Big Ten Conference that would be sending teams to Los Angeles to play to play conference games at USC or UCLA. But please, don’t even try to compare attending a UCLA game in Pasadena to a USC game in Los Angeles. It’s not even close. Yes, UCLA plays in a picturesque setting, but USC plays in a historic Coliseum setting that’s second to none, which that features - if you sit in the upper level of this famous sports edifice the background of the skyline of Los Angeles, the Hollywood sign, and the Griffith Park Observatory - generations of local, national, and international sports history. As it pertains to the Trojans, how much do Big Ten fans really know about USC football outside of a New Year’s Day in the Rose Bowl? Well, the venerable O/NSO is about to give you a little civics lesson, and consider this Part 1 of your “USC welcome wagon seminar.”