Will Usc Fans Pull For Wildcats In The Rose Bowl?

Which team will you root for, USC fans?

In years past, Northwestern was a good loser, an obedient loser, a consistent and reliable loser. That was its role.

I recall growing up and reading the college football roundup on the sports page of my Sunday paper. Northwestern’s results were always last: “Iowa buries Northwestern, 58-0.” As if “routs” or “thrashes” or “clobbers”’ did not adequately describe what happened to the poor, defenseless Wildcats.

“Buries.” It doesn’t get any worse than “buries.”

Often a movement would surface to remove Northwestern from the Big Ten. The school had too many scholars to have its reputation sullied week after week by brawny denizens of larger football factories whose vocabulary usually did not go beyond “Hut! Hut!” and “Duh! Duh!”

But many football and basketball coaches from the likes of Indiana, Michigan and Ohio State wanted Northwestern in the fold, primarily because Northwestern was based next to the talent-rich Chicago area. When other Big Ten schools marched into town, they wanted to be able to invite recruits to watch them … well … bury Northwestern.

Thanks to head coach Gary Barnett and some sizable scholars, the Wildcats are now champions of the Big Ten and headed to the Rose Bowl to play USC.

This might be the only Rose Bowl I can think of where USC fans will be torn as to which team to support.

The Trojans come into the game with an 8-2-1 record. It isn’t good enough, at least to most observers of USC football. Lose to Notre Dame and UCLA in the same year - again! - and the season is a failure, no matter what New Year’s Day has in store.

Northwestern is so vibrant, so alive, so full of innocence and wonder that it is infectious, even in enemy quarters. Across the nation on Saturday, Ohio State was the most unpopular football team going, at least against Michigan - while the Wildcats waited in Evanston, Ill., with their hopes and dreams on their sleeves.

Northwestern, so accustomed to losing, won beyond anyone’s expectations. USC, linked so closely with a winning tradition, flopped miserably.

To which team do you give your heart, USC fans?

Do you rally around the Trojans, hoping for some glimmer of redemption after emotionally devastating defeats against the Irish and the Bruins? Or do you write off the season, release yourselves of your cardinal-and-gold obligation and root for a team that exemplifies all that is joyous and uplifting in college football?

Tough call.

The current USC team has a lot of good kids with a tremendous amount of character. But let’s face it, if you look up the word “underachievers” in the dictionary, there is a team poster of the 1995 Trojans. They’ve been outplayed and outcoached by the school’s two chief rivals. Over the final seven games, they’ve emerged from their locker room and needed a compass to find respectability.

They let down just about everybody in their camp. It isn’t just losing to Notre Dame and UCLA. It’s the way they lost. They seemed to lack spirit, determination, even interest. They didn’t look like a team that wanted to live up to a winning tradition, but rather like one that wanted to distance itself from it.

Northwestern has no such past. Its annals are rife with academic achievement and gridiron ineptitude. What is so glorious about the Wildcats’ conference championship is that they did not relax their emphasis on education by one scintilla. The rigid academic requirements of the school known as the Harvard of the Midwest remain lofty; it is the football program that rose to meet them.

I asked a friend of mind who is a Northwestern grad what students there expect from their football team.

“We dream about a 6-5 season,” he said.

Barnett, with his emphasis on positive thinking and on fundamentally sound, mistake-free football, has enchanted a nation by surpassing that modest goal with a 10-1 campaign.

And look at the soldiers with which he did it. The names of Northwestern’s players don’t grace the police blotter. They aren’t having their SAT scores challenged. They aren’t willing prey for slimeball agents.

They seem like the kind of kids who still wear lettermen jackets, lead their fraternity brothers in solemn songs, arrive late to an occasional practice because a lecture ran long, drive around in jalopies passed down through the family, know where the library is, know when to say when, put homecoming on the same level with Thanksgiving and Christmas, and, if they do happen to talk trash, cause opponents to run for a dictionary. All of that while fans in bearskin coats and straw hats wave pennants and chant, “Boolah Boolah!”

There hasn’t been a Cinderella story in years like the Northwestern Wildcats earning a bid to the Rose Bowl. They are practically irresistible.

I guess we’ll find out just how irresistible on Jan. 1, when USC fans have to decide if their hearts are still with the Trojans or if they’ve been stolen away.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Michael Ventre Los Angeles Daily News