There are seven place settings, but only six people ever sit around this table any more. Someone was uninvited to these gatherings years ago and was never invited back. People make mistakes, they fall out with their friends or their boss, they become estranged, they wear out their welcome, but families are supposed to be different. To hear some people tell it, this black balled

member was group’s brightest light, its youngest best hope. But for a moment of controversy and accusation, he brought honor and accolades and victorious moments to the family. This family has long professed that once you’re in you can never be out, that its blood is thick, forming a lifelong genetic connection that is resistant to the strife and imperfections and earthly preoccupations that break other families. Alas, it was all lip service, at the first sign of trouble it could no longer fight on and the challenges that should have cemented its bonds instead caused it to turn on its own, to surrender its family values and rather than standing together it singled out the individual, called him names and banished him from hearth and table.

The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum is empty, and it’s not because the Rams are playing. It’s not empty in the literal sense, but in the spiritual sense—it has no soul. Its soul left, vanished, when Reggie Bush’s jersey left. No soul, no guts, just like the administration and athletic hierarchy at USC. There’s no need to debate the accusations and circumstances of the Reggie Bush incident, because while you can certainly make a case for injustice and NCAA bias, the damage wasn’t done at the point of alleged infraction, but in the years that have elapsed since. There was a point where Pat Haden and the University could justify taking the high road and putting on appearances. Even if the School got to the point of contrition after it was much, much too late, that ultimate strategy had merit. But that was ten years ago, the witch hunt is long over and still we have just six jerseys in the Coliseum, six Heismans in Heritage Hall, six showcases in programs and yearbooks and press releases, six place settings at a table that should rightly have seven chairs.

Reggie Bush happened (thank God). He’s on the Mount Rushmore of USC football badasses. He won the Heisman, we all watched him do it. He’s one of us! He didn’t bring disgrace to Troy he brought it life! Bush and Pete Carroll breathed life into the corpse that was Trojan football when the body was given up for dead. If the so-called Trojan Family has even an ounce of credibility, Bush needs to be in it. USC is a private institution that has the resources to essentially do as it wishes. Only politically correct punks do what’s popular when they have the chance to take a stand and do what’s right. Tell the NCAA to suck it and give Bush back his Heisman and his hallowed place in the Coliseum, not as an act of arrogance, but as an act of righting a wrong. USC sold out, but they can fix it. Families take care of their own. Bush needs to be invited back to the Trojan table.