I’ve made it to an age when I’m not sure if I have actual memories or whether I’ve concocted them all in my head as I’ve gone along. But I know my dad gave me a lot of cool stuff, concepts to live by mostly, but one of the grooviest things he turned me onto was USC football.
The 2017 Pac-12 regular season is over, so what have we learned? Well, some of the most compelling stuff was revealed about its coaches. We learned that, in Gary Anderson, Oregon State made one of the worst hires in recent memory. The state of Arizona has two overrated coaches who will dazzle in September, pretty much suck in Autumn and would have been fired if the desert programs had any tradition or aspirations for greatness. Jim Mora was a chap ass who failed wonderfully despite having two of the very best quarterbacks in the program’s history. Colorado’s a stranger in a strange land and any recent success was a fluke. The Mike Leach experiment is mostly over even though I appreciate a fat, sloppily-dressed coach as much as the next guy. And there’s reason for hope at Cal … not really, I just wanted to see who was paying attention.
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