No. 4 SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA TROJANS

High turnover can't slow Trojans expectations

There is an East Coast Bias. The media and fans in the eastern and central time zones rarely watch all of the games on the west coast, and few of them watch anything but the really huge contests. The majority of fans only see highlights or read on-line summaries. So obviously when a team such as USC plays a hard fought game against a motivated Oregon or Cal (and gets an impact player or two banged up), then few fans or pundits know anything more than the mighty Trojans struggled against (what can only be surmised as) an inferior foe.

Yes, the Trojans fall in opposition to that media bias. The one that says the Pac-10 is the Pacific 1, and that USC only has to get up for three games a year.

But the bias is not to be blamed for USC's inability to reach a BCS Championship Game since 2005. That failure is set squarely on the Trojans.

USC is not merely a good program. It's a giant of a program; it will likely be seen as the team of the decade (and that includes a 2009 Florida national championship). The Trojans haven't been great this decade; they've been amazing. The Trojans are on a run of seven straight seasons of 11 wins or more. They won the 2004 National Championship in a romp and were an epic Vince Young performance away from a second (sorry Trojan fans; the 2003 Champ is LSU).

And no one plays better when the lights are on. USC rocks against any major opponent during the regular season (and will again in Columbus this fall), and Pete Carroll has made the Trojans one of the best teams ever when given a month to prepare. But no sort of East Coast Bias has played a factor in USC's relegation to the Rose Bowl each January. That's come from losses to UCLA, Stanford, Oregon State.

The only thing that stood in the way of a USC-Ohio State BCS Championship Game in 2006 was lowly UCLA, and the Trojans gaffed that one in a 13-9 loss; the first time in 63 games that USC hadn't scored 20 points. In 2007, USC lost at home to a 41-point underdog Stanford team that went 1-11 in 2006 and had been beaten by the Trojans 42-0; at season's end, a two-loss team was needed to play Ohio State, and the Trojans could hardly be considered. In 2008, USC lost at Oregon State, the Trojans second straight loss in Corvallis.

Any other team that was this schizophrenic would have been pushed out of the national conscious long ago - no matter their location. But it's an indication of the high level of talent and the respect for what Carroll has accomplished that shows an East Coast Bias doesn't plague the Trojans. It's actually their inability to perform week-in and week-out that limits USC.

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Part of a two-week long look into the 2009 Preseason Southern Fans' College Football Poll. New posts released each day, culminating with the No. 1 team on September 3.