Almost before Southern California coach Pete Carroll had exited his weekly press luncheon Tuesday, the word had come down from the NCAA football rules committee.
USC's Trojans would only be penalized one timeout, in the first half, Saturday against UCLA at the Rose Bowl, as a consequence of wearing their cardinal home jerseys instead of the prescribed white for the visiting team.
And since UCLA Coach Rick Neuheisel has already agreed to match USC's first-half timeout by burning one of his own, the drama of Carroll' decision earlier this week to return to the old ways with each team in home jerseys had played out.
It had taken eight years to get here, but in a Rivalry Week where the UCLA ticket office still had something like 1,000 unsold tickets for Saturday's game, the buzz was back a bit. If not about the game itself, at least about the uniforms. And the tradition.
"It's no disrespect for UCLA," USC senior Jeff Byers said. "It's the great tradition of this game."
Carroll said his gesture this year "is an invitation for UCLA to do it" and wear the powder blue next year at the Coliseum. And "an encouragement for other rivalry teams to do it."
Now, with the NCAA ruling, maybe they will.
For this rivalry "so close to home," Carroll called it to differentiate from others, "it's a fun event."
And not a rivalry involving the coaches, Carroll said, no matter how hard anyone tries.
"They can do whatever they want," Carroll said. "I don't sign off on that. It's more than about the coaches."
In the case of a USC group of fourth- and fifth-year seniors who have won the Pac-10 championship and beaten one archrival, Notre Dame, every season they've been here, it's invariably about something else.
It's about 2006, in the Rose Bowl, for a BCS-championship-game-denying 13-9 upset. Check out the thousands of blue-and-gold T-shirts with nothing else on them Saturday.
Even if Carroll vehemently denies that game is a part of anything USC will do this week.
"We don't operate that way," Carroll said of "external stuff."
"We won't talk about last year or years in the past or when (UCLA's 1967 Heisman Trophy winner) Gary Beban was playing."
But Carroll would talk about the 4-7 Bruins, with no bowl possibilities left for them -- especially the defense that shut USC down two years ago.
"DeWayne Walker is a really good football coach," Carroll said of the Bruins defensive coordinator (and former USC assistant in the running for a number of head coaching jobs right now). "They played great last week at Arizona State. . . . They looked loaded-up, fired-up, well-schooled, great intensity, all that. That's what gives any team a chance to beat somebody."
As it did the Bruins two years ago.
"We couldn't move the football," Carroll said, and "struggled early . . . didn't convert on a couple of third-and-shorts, fourth-and-short."
That game's format, Carroll said, "was reminiscent of the Oregon State game (the team's lone loss this year). Same kind of thing happened."
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
Must credit The Press-Enterprise of Riverside, Calif.
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