The rivalries that are going away
USC and UCLA will still be playing each other, but this weekend marks another rivalry that may not be played again for a while
This Saturday night at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, Stanford will play USC in the first Pac-12 conference game of the season for both teams. Stanford is 1-0 (beating Hawai’i) and USC is 2-0 (beating San Jose State and Nevada).
This wil be the 103rd meeting between the two schools in football, a series that dates back to 1905 and is the oldest rivalry of any USC opponent. USC leads the series, 65-34-3 although officially the 2005 USC win doesn’t exist in the eyes of the NCAA, but trust me it happened.
Next year, USC will be off to the Big 10 along with UCLA, Washington, and Oregon. Stanford and its Big Game rival, Cal1, head to the ACC. Unless USC and Stanford finish first and second in the Pac-12 this season, this may be the last time the two teams play each other in football for a very long time. (If they finish 1-2, they would play again in Las Vegas for the conference championship.) From the sources I’ve checked, USC doesn’t have a nonconference opponent opening until at least 2028. USC only has two slots available each year as they are locked into playing Notre Dame every year likely forever.
USC and Stanford first played on November 4, 1905 on the Stanford campus. USC was 5-0 coming into the game, but had not played any college teams. Their first five wins were over: National Guard (Company F) by a 28-0 margin. Then came a 12-0 win over the Harvard School (now Harvard-Westlake, but a military school at the time). 2. Next was a 27-0 shutout of Los Angeles Polytechnic High School (which doesn’t exist anymore and is now the state of Los Angeles Trade Tech Community College), then a 75-0 win over the Whittier Reform school. 3 And then USC beat an alumni squad by a 63-0 margin.
Were all these games sufficienct preparation to face a fairly well coached Stanford side? Stanford was also undefeated coming into the game, but had mainly played college teams up to that point, beating St. Vincent (which is now Loyola Marymount), Willamette (alma mater of one of my nieces!), the 15th Infantry, Oregon, Nevada, and then eking out a 6-4 win in Los Angeles over the Sherman Indian Institute, which was (and still is) a residential school for Native Americans.4
When USC ventured up to Stanford in November, it was not particularly close as Stanford won by a 16-0 margin, although the Los Angeles Times reported the final score as 17-0. This was the first football game USC had played outside of Southern California.
The two teams wouldn’t meet again until 1918 as Stanford stopping playing football for a stretch and switched to rugby. During this time, USC improved its program, made Dean Cromwell the coach and started to play more college opponents. USC would win five straight starting in 19185 and has had the upper hand in the series since then. USC won 12 straight from 1958-1969 and 11 straight from 1980-1990. Stanford’s longest winning streak in the rivalry has been just four games from 2009-2012.
USC has played the other Bay Area team, Cal, more often than Stanford (110 times), but didn’t meet for the first time until 1915. There are more Cal-USC games than Stanford-USC games because Stanford mostly stopped playing during World War II while USC and Cal played each other twice a season during the war.
The first USC-Cal game was played in Berkeley on October 23 and USC came out ahead 28-106. This was Cal’s first year back of playing American football after playing rugby and the team was not quite adept yet at the hitting required. Also, USC threw three toucdown passes in the game, which was rare for that time. Cal would come back to go 9-0-1 against USC in the next 10 years, but after that it’s been pretty much a one-sided rivalry, with USC leading 71-32-5 with each team losing a win because of NCAA violations.
There are not many driveable road trips in the Pac-12 for Los Angeles fans outside of the trips to the Bay Area. And those are going away. Instead of weekends away after a journey up I-5, Trojan and Bruin fans will be forced to fly to places like Rutgers or Purdue for a weekend of college football.7
The Los Angeles-Bay Area rivalries may not have the prestige of SEC or Big 10 rivalries, but they are longstanding. And quite historic. And they are being tossed out the window with little thought. I guess we’ll get over it, but I really doubt that something like say, a UCLA loss to Wisconsin, will inspire me to send off a series of profane angry texts to my former UCLA roommate after Stanford had beaten UCLA for the 12th straight time. But perhaps I shouldn’t be getting that worked up over such things.
I will leave you with this: UCLA has played more games against Cal and Stanford (93 each) than they have against USC (92).
Aka California, aka UC Berkeley. Please don’t call it the University of California as that applies to all the campuses in the system. The only school that does refer to itself as the University of California with no geographic qualifier is UC Berkeley. Because the school is somewhat full of itself. I say this as a person with degrees from UCLA and UC Berkeley.
Harvard didn’t have enough players so USC’s head coach Harvey Holmes along with assistant coach Dean Cromwell played for Harvard.
The game was played with just two 15-minute halves! The school later became the Nelles Youth Correctional Center, but it is now closed.
In this era, a touchdown was worth 5 points and field goal was worth 4. An extra point was still 1 point.
Stanford says the 1918 loss doesn’t count because they weren’t fielding. a team strictly of Stanford students, but a team that was mostly soldiers in training for World War I.
Today’s scoring system was in place now.
Speaking as a UCLA fan, we barely want to go to Pasadena. We certainly aren’t flying to New Jersey for the weekend.
I am shocked You People(TM) still have residential schools for Native Americans.
Go Irish!