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Power shifts from UCLA to USC like a major earthquake

Football fans, you don't need a sports writer to tell you how everything changed so suddenly and dramatically between USC and UCLA.

You need a seismologist -- to measure the Big One that shifted the balance of power from the UCLA campus to USC's. You need a meteorologist -- to describe the tornado that lifted the capitol of West Coast football off the ground in Westwood, spun it around and around and upside down, and deposited it with a thud near downtown. You need, what, an oceanographer? -- to explain the tidal wave that is washing over Karl Dorrell and taking Pete Carroll for a boogie-board ride.

This is more a phenomenon of nature than of sports, all right.

Wasn't it yesterday that everything -- tectonic plates, the wind, the waves -- was running east to west?

UCLA was a fount of creativity named Bob Toledo, USC was Paul Hackett. UCLA was a Heisman Trophy contender named Cade McNown, USC was John Fox. UCLA was 20 wins in a row and national-championship hopes, USC was a Sun Bowl loss to TCU.

"It's changed a lot," UCLA receiver Craig Bragg, a junior, said this week. "I remember in my [freshman] year, we were 6-0 and there was an article in the paper that said this is a `Bruin town.' Ever since that article, it seems like it's turned around.

"I believed it," Bragg said of the Bruins' claim to rule the city. "I believed it before I came here. Cade was everything. The receivers were [stars]. I was excited about being a Bruin."

He paused to say he's still excited about being a Bruin, then went on.

"It's amazing how quickly it's changed," Bragg said.

What feels like yesterday actually was midway through the 2001 season, when Toledo's Bruins were 6-0 and No. 4 in the nation and first-year coach Pete Carroll's Trojans were 2-5.

Since then, the Bruins are have lost 11 of 21 games and the Trojans have won 18 of 21 -- including, of course, three USC victories over UCLA.

Now, the Trojans are 3-0 and No. 3 in the nation going into their game at California on Saturday, and the Bruins are 1-2 and nowhere going into their game against San Diego State at the Rose Bowl on Saturday night.

When was the gulf between the two football teams this wide?

Maybe November 1979, when the Trojans were 8-0-1 and No. 3 and the Bruins were 3-5.

When did it change this fast?

Never.

That might be a distressing thought for Dorrell, the Bruins' first-year coach, trying to improve on the loss- and scandal-plagued Toledo and so far struggling on both counts.

But Dorrell looks at the Bruins' fall and the Trojans' rise and sees a reminder of how suddenly a college program's trajectory can turn for the better.

"The last time I was here it was the opposite," said Dorrell, who was a receiver on the Terry Donahue-coached Bruins that won four of five games from the Ted Tollner Trojans in 1982-1986. "History has proven you can raise a program from down in the doldrums to a respectable program, and that's where we're going."

The thing about these tectonic shifts between USC and UCLA football is that they tend not to last. Not since the 1970s has one school won more games than the other for more than three seasons in a row. Only once since the Great Depression has one school won more games than the other for more than four seasons in a row.
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