Waa

Suppose you're an editor for the Daily Trojan. This makes you a student at a university whose football team is as deep as the Pacific in talent, eight-deep at tailback, with ten returning starters on a defense that spent the last three games of last season terrorizing, in order, the offenses of Notre Dame, UCLA, and Michigan. You are a few days away from a season-opener against the second-best team in the state of Idaho, a game your school will win by, oh, fourteen touchdowns.

Your school is number one in every poll in the country. Oregon presents a problem, Nebraska is always tough at home, and, on Thanksgiving Day, Sun Devil Stadium will contain 70,000 screaming freaks hanging from the rafters. (Does anyone remember? The last two times USC got Arizona State in Tempe, it needed second-half comebacks to win. For ASU, beating Arizona is money earned. Beating USC is money won.) Oh, and up at Cal, Tedford will think of something.

Beyond that, not so much. Notre Dame is down. The Washington schools--not so much. Arizona is . . . well, one day they'll break through and that will be terrifying. But right now, like Kansas in the Big-12, Arizona remains a basketball school in a football conference. USC gets Oregon State and UCLA at home with revenge in their eye. And Stanford . . . well, Harbaugh is amusing.

Bottom line, a few challenges, but a better-than-even chance to wind up in New Orleans sometime in mid-January.

Finally, if you are a senior, you've stood witness to 1) an undefeated BCS Championship, 2) The Greatest Game Ever Played (Bush Push ring a bell?), 3) a second BCS Championship Game that, though ending in heartbreak, could be appreciated as another all-time classic, 4) a good old-fashioned Rose Bowl ass-whooping of Michigan.

So, given all the above, to what end do you concentrate your efforts?

Of course: you whine about some UCLA blog's revelation about a USC assistant coach's long-ago involvement with dog-fighting.

While we do not condone (Todd) McNair's previous behaviors, no new evidence of McNair mistreating animals has come to light. BruinsNation's story is not newsworthy - rehashing a 14-year-old, already settled issue does nothing for readers today. The statute of limitations has expired, McNair has paid his dues to society. Nothing more can be asked of him than to not engage in such behavior again, and there is no reason to believe he has.

BruinsNation has used the media frenzy fueled by the Vick case to take advantage of McNair and has accused the Trojans of acting inhumanely by employing a man who was convicted of a crime, as if no coaches at UCLA have ever themselves been convicted.

Oh, go stuff a sock in it, kids. Had this run as a banner headline across the front page of the Daily Bruin, there might have been some cause for complaint. But it ran as an item on a blog a helluva lot fewer people read than read the DT. Sorry to say, but the gang over at Westwood played this sliver of a story just about right, and the folks at my former paper overreacted in a spasm of self-pity.

Bottom line:

UCLA 13, USC 9. It hurt me as much as it hurt anyone. I couldn't function for a week. But exploding on something like this won't make it go away.

Thanks to Deadspin.