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Why College Football Outpasses,
Outclasses, and
Flat-Out Surpasses the NFL
AUSTIN MURPHY
To my father, J. Austin Murphy Jr.: former Colgate “end”
who also sang in the Thirteen; who never ma de a ba d
snap as a single-wing center at St. Joe’s prep
in Buffalo, New York, nor missed a n opportunity to
remind us of th at fact. Rex, you rule.
CONTENTS
Prologue 1
1
Irish Eyes 15
2
Here We Come Again! 31
3
This Is the Day, and You Are the Team 47
4
The Brawl in the Royal, or The Blunt Truth 59
5
“We few, we happy few . . .” 79
6
Losin’s Losin’ 95
7
Redeemed 113
8
Meet Me in Frog Alley 127
9
Toomer’s Corner 139
iv Contents
10
Decline . . . 157
11
Back in the Hunt 169
12
. . . and Fall 183
Photographic Insert
13
Grand Theft 201
14
Judgment Day 223
15
With Our Bare Hands 243
16
You’re Going to Need Some Help Today 259
17
Bowlnanza 275
18
TBCSNCG 291
Epilogue 313
Postscript 325
Appendix 337
Acknowledgments 343
About the Author
Other Books by Austin Murphy
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
I come not to praise Pete Carroll, but to bury him.
What else is there to do, really? It’s halftime of the 2007 Rose
Bowl, and I am marshaling synonyms for “decline.” I am casting
about for different ways to say that the Carroll Era at the Univer-
sity of Southern California is over, finito, kaput, deceased. It was
fun while it lasted.
On New Year’s Day, 2007, I am one of 94,000 souls at the Rose
Bowl, a venue the Trojans had transformed, under their manic,
mop-topped head coach, into a kind of home away from home, an
annex to the L.A. Coliseum. Over the past year, however, this
grand and glamorous old showground has become an open-air
sepulcher for USC’s national championship hopes.
The once-dynastic Trojans, winners of 52 of their last 57 games,
owners of two national championships, plodded through much of
the 2006 season on clay feet. Bereft of quarterback Matt Leinart
and his Mercury-and-Mars tailback tandem of Reggie Bush and
LenDale White, hobbled by injuries to key players—including
the first-, second- and third-string fullbacks—the USC offense in
2006 was a halting, hiccuping, sclerotic shell of its former self.
The periodic scoring binges orchestrated by first-year quarterback
2 Saturday Rules
John David Booty proved the exception, rather than the rule. With
every false start, each three-and-out, Southern California squan-
dered a little more of the mystique that in the not-so-distant past
had some teams beaten before they stepped off the bus.
Coming off a game in which they put up all of seven points, a
loss to UCLA that knocked them out of the national title game
and flung open the door for Florida, the Trojans are proving to a
national TV audience that there’s plenty more offensive slapstick
where that came from. They’ve mustered all of three points in the
first half against the Wolverines, who have mirrored their strug-
gles on offense. The halftime score is 3-all.
After winning 44 of 45 games between October 12, 2002, and
December 3, 2005—a span that included two national champion-
ships—the Trojans have now dropped three of their last 13, and
are staring down the possibility of a fourth defeat. If ’SC were a
stock, it would be past time to sell. That would have been my run-
down on this once-great outfit, if not for one minor occurrence.
They played the second half.
During a tense halftime exchange, we will later learn, Lane Kif-
fin and Steve Sarkisian pleaded with Carroll to allow them to
throw the running game overboard. Offensive coordinator Kiffin
and assistant head coach Sarkisian—SarKiffian, as they are
known—share play-calling duties. The head man comes around to
their way of thinking on ’SC’s first drive of the second half, as the
Trojans gain zero yards on consecutive rushes, forcing a punt.
Fine, he tells SarKiffian. Air it out. Do what you need to do.
Like Julia Roberts dumping Lyle Lovett, the Trojans abandon
the run, and discover something about themselves. They learn
that when the offensive line gives quarterback John David Booty
time, when the fullback figures out whom he is supposed to block,
and when Booty refrains from throwing the ball into the out-
stretched palms of opposing defensive linemen, this offense is ca-
pable of engineering the sort of serial big plays that hold their own
Prologue 3
beside the pyrotechnics engineered by Leinart, or Carson Palmer
before him.
One of the more irresistible songs played by the Spirit of Troy
marching band throughout the 2006 season was a drum-heavy
number that would read, if anyone wrote the lyrics:
BOOTYbootybootybootybootybootybooty,
Rockin’ everywhere! Rockin’ everywhere!
(Repeat until TV time-out ends.)
The song is catchy and welcome for several reasons: (1) It’s em-
inently danceable; (2) It is relatively fresh, for the simple reason
that the Trojan marching band has not played it roughly one hun-
dred times every autumn Saturday for the last century; (3) It is, in
the second half against Michigan, highly relevant. Booty is rockin’
everywhere, gouging the Wolverines for big chunks of yardage
almost every time he cocks his arm to throw. The redshirt junior
shreds Michigan for four touchdowns and 289 yards in the second
half, while the Trojans defense continues to treat Wolverines quar-
terback Chad Henne like its own personal piñata (Henne
will be sacked six times). By the time the game is over—a 32–18
Trojans win—Southern California has announced to the college
football cosmos that reports of its demise have been greatly exag-
gerated.
The 2007 Rose Bowl has been entertaining and revealing—
seeming to suggest that the lords of the Big Ten remain unable to
match the speed of the teams from warmer climes. (More light
will be shed on this trend a week later, when the Gators take on
highly favored Ohio State in the national title game.)
But the Rose Bowl is not the best game of college football’s
postseason. Indeed, it is not even the best game of the day.
A time zone away, in the Phoenix suburb of Glendale, in a
newly minted domed stadium that calls to mind nothing quite so
much as an almost-ready batch of Jiffy Pop popcorn, a mismatch is
brewing.
4 Saturday Rules
. . . .
The Oklahoma Sooners ached to prove that they were a Top 5
team, never mind their two losses. They’d weathered multiple
tempests: the preseason banishment of their starting quarterback;
a screw-job from Pac-10 officials that cost them a victory at Ore-
gon; the loss of the nation’s top running back, Adrian Peterson,
who’d snapped his collarbone in mid-October. But the Sooners
had regrouped and rallied to win the Big Twelve. With Peterson
finally recovered, Oklahoma intended to remind the Republic that
they were not so far removed from the mighty Sooner squads that
reached three national title games between 2000 and ’03. They
could make their point in the Fiesta Bowl by blowing out the poor,
overmatched Broncos of Boise State.
As widely predicted, the score got lopsided in a hurry. Sick and
tired of hearing how they had no business in one of these top-shelf
BCS bowls, the Broncos mugged the Big Twelve champions the
moment they stepped out of the tunnel. Boise State led 14–0 early,
21–10 at the half, and 28–10 with just over five minutes to play in
the third quarter, when the equilibrium in big-time college foot-
ball seemed to reestablish itself. A Broncos turnover led to 25 un-
answered points, resulting in a 35–28 Oklahoma lead with 17
seconds left in regulation. And this is where the 2006 college foot-
ball season stepped through the looking glass. This is where Bron-
cos quarterback Jared Zabransky, ignoring torn rib cartilage he
incurred while being sacked two plays earlier, looked to the side-
line on fourth and forever. There was his backup, Taylor Tharp,
pantomiming the act of juggling. Why juggling? I would ask
Zabransky after the season.
“You know, like in a circus,” he replied. “The play is called
Circus.”
That description understates the implausibility, the outrageous-
ness, of the action that unspooled as I navigated my way from the
Rose Bowl back to my hotel in West L.A. While I focused on not
missing any turnoffs—merging from the 134 to the 2 to the 5 to
Description:Does the NFL have better athletes than the college teams? Yes. Does it ensure more direct flights? Undoubtedly. Which game is better, more entertaining, less predictable? It's not even close. Austin Murphy firmly believes that college football—with its rich traditions and deep passions, its marchi
