It's a statistical dead heat and both teams are red hot: USC and Arizona will enter the Galen Center on fire. USC leads the Pac-10 with a four game winning streak, Arizona is right behind them with three consecutive wins. Both teams lost earlier in the season to #4 Kansas and #2 Memphis, but both teams have rebounded in their latest win-streaks to take down a top-10 school. USC's wins include an upset over then #4 UCLA. Arizona's includes an upset over #6, Washington State.
USC's got Mayo with 19.9 pts/G, Arizona's got Bayless with 19.9 pts/G. While Arizona has a near 4 point lead on scoring offense, USC bests Arizona's scoring defense by nearly four points. While Arizona ranks #2 in the conference in field-goal and #1 in three-point percentages, USC leads the conference on both counts defensively. Arizona's got Budinger, USC answers with Jefferson. USC shouts "Lewis!," "Hackett," and "Gibson!", Arizona screams back, "Hill!", "McClellan!" and "Wise!". It seems for every question raised by one team, the other has an answer. But the real question will be answered tonight.
Bot teams come in to the Galen Center red-hot, but only one team will leave with the victory.
Steve Megargee, sports writer for Rivals.com, has compiled a list of what he figures to be the best 15 games of the season. Three USC games make the cut: Nebraska, Cal and UCLA. Inside, we'll go further in depth into these three match-ups giving you the juicy details. We'll tell you what's up, who's who, and what to look out for...
As you've probably heard by now, ASU has found their next coach. Dennis Erickson -- the man once considered for the job now inhabited by Pete Carroll -- will be the head coach of the Sun Devils in 2007.
Scott Wolf mentioned on his Inside USC "blog" that "every Pac-10 coach just got a lot more worried about the Sun Devils than they were when Dirk Koetter coached the team."
I say Wolf is right, if he means that we should all be worried about the general safety of our communities when Arizona State comes to town.
From the AP by way of ESPN -- this pretty much says it all:
Harris finished his two-year stint with a 6-17 record after losing 26-17 in the Big Game to California on Saturday. He had the shortest tenure of any Stanford coach since Rod Dowhower left after one season in 1979 with a 5-5-1 record.
Over at the USC FanHouse, our own Kyle Bunch offers some words of advice to the Trojan team, as they get ready for this weekend's clash with Oregon State:
The A side of the 2006 season is done, and while it might not have featured any breakout chart-topping hits, it was still a flawless tracks 1 through 6. But we all know this album will be judged on the B side that's about to start spinning. Let's just make sure we don't overlook track 7 (and 8, for that matter, even though it is lowly Stanford) on our way to the rock anthems that will be tracks 9-12 and the big encore/finale of track 13.
Madness. Chaos. How does "stopping the clock to move the chains" turn into a full-blown timeout? As bad as the end of Oregon-Oklahoma was with the botched replay, at least there they had the excuse of lo-fi technology and stupid new rules (fuck replay--there, we said it).
This is just plain sloppy, and if the Pac-10 is going to suspend refs after the Oregon debacle, then these jokers should all be getting a week off as well.
Another week, another set of Action News Pac-10 Power Rankings. Very little movement this week -- almost every Pac-10 team (except Stanford) either played and won or didn't play.
Tested against Nebraska, came out with an easy win. The Trojan defense looked solid on all but two plays -- a fake punt and a play where an obvious block in the back was missed by the refs (gotta love that Pac-10 officiating!).
Toughest test of the Ducks season yet, and they got out alive (even though they needed some referee intervention at that). Oregon's looking good at 3-0. Of course, they'll need to be better than good to get from 3-0 to 5-0, with their next two games AT Arizona State and Cal.
Taught Portland State who's boss, just like they did to Minnesota. This week they go back to playing real teams, when the Sun Devils (who didn't exactly thrill against Colorado) come to town. The Showdown for #3 in the Power Rankings kicks off at 12:30pm pt.
The good news -- they beat Colorado 21-3. The catch -- this year's Colorado team is 0-3 (including a loss to Montana State), so 21-3 isn't anything to write home about.
Took the week off. Rumors around the office said it had something to do with their periods attracting bears. Whatever the case, the Bru-crew drops 1 slot from a 4th place tie to 5th.*
Beat Fresno State 21-20 -- almost enough to move them ahead of the Wildcats; a win this weekend against the Bruins would go a long way towards taking them seriously.
How patriotic of the Cardinal, to let the Navy come in to Palo Alto and score 37 points. Great job guys.
* - Don't despair Bruin fans (b/c we know from our tracking that so many of you read us regularly) a Huskie pummeling this week (or a solid return by Hugh Johnson) combined with somebody getting beat resoundingly in the Cal-ASU game could move Tits McGee back into 4th.
Another week, another set of Action News Pac-10 Power Rankings. Not a ton of movement up top, but some shuffling down below. Except of course for that bottom slot, which Stanford seems dead-set on keeping all season long.
Rudy Carpenter obviously musked up before suiting up to play Nevada. With 594 yards passing and 7 TDs through 2 games, Ruuuuuudy! might even be emerging as a darkhorse Heisman candidate. Next up is Colorado, where Rudy will need to pad those stats some more, before an UGLY 3-week stretch against Cal, Oregon and USC.
After a solid opener against Utah, Bruin enthusiasm was tempered somewhat with a less-than-impressive 26-16 victory over "The Stanford of Texas." This week Tits McGee heads north for its first conference game against Washington. We're waiting for this week's input from Hugh Johnson before we analyze the Baby Blues any further.
We didn't necessarily expect the Wildcats to BEAT LSU, especially after their tepid opener against BYU. But we at least thought they'd show up and play. Instead LSU turned the Wildcats' visit into their own personal Whammy-fest.
After that shameful opening game against San Jose State, at least they showed up against Oklahoma -- putting up 20 points and forcing Adrian Peterson (Is there anyone else on his team? We didn't notice.) to actually work for the W.
Just when we started to get excited for the Beav (around the time they went up 14-0 on Boise State), somebody comes along and chops an arm off, to the tune of 42 unanswered points. Ouch.
With the first week's action out of the way, and all of the Pac-10 sporting a game under their belts, here's our first update to the Action News Pac-10 Power Rankings. As usual, no tricky dance moves, no high impact gyrations:
Sure it was Stanford, but the Ducks looked good. If a QB emerges in Eugene to lead this team, they are almost assured of just barely getting assed-out by the BCS yet again.
We're still too disgusted by what we saw to even comment. Wes Mantooth, you've disgraced the entire San Diego anchorman profession with your showing in Knoxville last weekend. Go sit in a corner and think about what you've done.
Sure they needed a late field goal to put away BYU. But Arizona is our darkhorse Pac-10 pick (and first conference opponent) -- so we're going to chalk that first game up to nerves/a surprisingly tough BYU team, and keep our eyes on the Wildcats real test -- this weekend against LSU.
The Southpaw Jesus era has officially begun in Pasadena. How do you know when it's September in Southern California? It's the time of year when the powder blue Kool-aid is being guzzled by the gallon.
The 56 points they put up was impressive, even if it was Eastern Washington they scored them on. The Beavers are going to surprise somebody this year -- we're just hoping for more than 5% visibility when the Trojans make the trip to Corvallis.
The Huskies enjoyed one of the first "if the rule change wasn't in place, what might have happened?" victory on Saturday against San Jose State. Next up is an Oklahoma team who didn't exactly overwhelm people against those stalwart Blazers of Alabama-Birmingham.
They hung tough with Auburn thru a lot of the first half, and didn't really get totally put away until the 4th quarter. Sure they really never had a chance -- but they didn't look much worse against Auburn than Cal did against Tennessee.
Yikes Stanford, yikes. Sure Wazzu lost too -- but at least they put up a fight on the road in Auburn. You guys headed a few hours north and got run over. Can't you guys get the Google billionaires to shell out and buy you a real team?
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