All Aboard the USC Trojan Bandwagon!

Saturday night, after a come-from-behind win by the USC Trojans over tOSU, I decide to log onto Facebook.  Scrolling through the home page and reading everybody’s status messages got me thinking.  Where did all of these USC football bandwagoners come from?

In 2000, the average attendance of a USC football game was 57,339, ranked 27th in the nation. The following years subsequently looked like this:

2001: 57,544 (ranked 27th)
2002: 66,853 (ranked 22nd)
2003: 77,804 (ranked 16th)
2004: 85,229 (ranked 8th)

Big 10, Big 12 and SEC conferences have been consistently selling-out 80,000-115,000 seat stadiums since the 1800s.  Penn State’s attendance for instance has always been ranked in the top five, even during losing seasons.  Unlike sunny Los Angeles, the majority of these teams play home games in sub-zero temperatures and inclement weather—neither of which seem to stifle the crowds.  Yet, prior to the Pete Carroll era, USC couldn’t give away tickets…so what’s changed?

“Fight On!”  “DOMINATION AGAIN!” “Love my Trojans!”  These were just some of the Facebook posts.

What has caused all this outpouring of support for the Trojans in the last few years?

Well for one, they started winning games—the sign of a true bandwagon.  Let’s face it, most USC “fans” found USC football within the last 10 years.  Most people can’t even name who the team’s coach was prior to ol’ PC.  For the sake of argument, I’m not referring to the actual USC fan base.  Here in Los Angeles, a school that large will have fans simply based off students and alumni.  I’m referring to the fringe.

They are like herpes.  One day you don’t see them, and then the next, they pop out sporting their Matt Leinart jerseys and “Fight On” license plate frames.

Where were these “fans” when USC lost to the University of Oregon four times in a row?  How about TCU in the Sun Bowl?

Many (choose to) forget that USC couldn’t buy a win against Notre Dame for 13 years between 1983 and 1996.

How about UCLA’s eight (8) game run between 1991 and 1998?

When you rattle these statistics off to USC homers, the typical reply is, “Dude, that stuff was like 100 years ago.”  The majority of these clowns have no comprehension of anything before the year 2000.

I partly blame ESPN for this.

ESPN has a habit of over-hyping everything from Bret Favre to USC football.  In fact, a few years ago Craig James referred to USC as the “best team ever” in college football.  Hardly.

Then again, they were spewing this even prior to the loss against Texas in the 2005 championship game.  We have had college football for over 140 seasons; trying to convince me that a team that rarely goes undefeated in their own conference is the “best ever” hardly suffices.

It is no coincidence that this bandwagon is being driven by a drunk ESPN driver who’s attempting to dominate a major market that has no NFL team.  The fact that this program is in the middle of a star-studded Los Angeles and not in the Midwest, makes it possible to hype the wagon as “the best program ever.”  USC has a good program, but the fans are what makes them intolerable.

Everybody I talk to is a “die-hard USC fan,” yet I seem to know more about “their” team then they do.

But I digress, there is really nothing worse than an obnoxious bandwagon fan base—my family included.

Perhaps these are simply left over Raiders and Rams fans who need a Los Angeles team to identify with.  For those fans, I can see how tailgating in South-Central feels a lot more like home than Pasadena.

Over the course of my lifetime, I have been to many USC football games, both home and away.  It is based on my experience that there is no group of fans more hate-able than ignorant USC gravy trainers.  Every program has some good years, but we’ll see what happens when that cardinal and gold train derails and goes flying off the tracks.

Who’s going to be left then?