1999 Week 4
September 29, 1999
I really enjoy this part of the football season. The weather here in Pitt is great--Mom can fend for herself when I head out to toss off some cold ones without me having to turn on the heat or A/C (I hate it when she starts whining about freezing when the thermostat reading drops below 50, so I humor her and set it at 55).
The games are getting better too. I enjoyed all the action and stayed up until 2:45 a.m. to watch that Oregon overtime thriller. I'm slowly beginning to understand this overtime thing. Apparently it's like those soccer shoot-outs, where you get five chances to score against the other team's goalie and designate five players to kick the ball.
In this case, Oregon had three different shots at the win and so had to use three different kickers. But USC used just one kicker! They cheated and didn't get in any trouble for it! Could you imagine the uproar if that chicks' soccer team that won the women's World Cups had used just one kicker? That poor gal would have had to wear five different shirts, one to yank off after each goal.
The stunner of the week was East Carolina coming back and defeating Miami. When Miami first put East Carolina on the schedule about ten years ago it was a creampuff game because East Carolina was an expansion team, as are most of those directional schools.
I even picked up a Rand McAnally Road Atlas and looked all over for the state of East Carolina. It's not even there!!! I think some of these states ran out of possible names for their state schools, so they started coming up with new state names, like East Carolina and North Arizona and putting schools and expansion football teams there.
I noticed East Carolina still hasn't got a home stadium, they had to play at NC State. They must be waiting for the voters to pass that bond issue to build themselves a home field.
The other confusing thing are these directional schools in Louisiana. NNE Lousiana, EW Lousiana, South Central LA., there's a whole bunch of them. But at least those little letters gave you some clue as to where they were in that big smelly crocodile infested swamp known as the Garden State.
Now we got "Louisiana-Monroe" and "Louisiana-Molasses". Who knows where those towns are? Do we really have all day to go looking up some podunk burg in the middle of nowhere just so we can remember which directional school it used to be? Besides, everyone knows that all those directional schools were just feeder schools for LSU and the Fighting Vampires (because they do all their damage at night). Hey, Gerry Faust DiNardo, I told you not to start that game against Auburn before sundown!!!
Speaking of Gerry Faust, I saw that Bob Davie said he wished he'd scheduled some directional schools this year? Hey, Bob, what about that team with the Song Girls and Mr. Ed? The first-ever directional school was South California, now known as USC.
There was no USC at the turn of the century, just the regular U-California school system. A wealthy man from LA, named Frank Latechs, was very interested in furthering educational opportunities in the LA basin. The U-Cal system would not allow him to donate any money to establish a new campus in the LA area since they already had UCLA.
Frank sat back a while and thought of different ways to realize his educational dream. Frank had made his money in the rubber industry. In fact, he designed the very first rubberized prophylactic, known as the Latechs condom, which later was shortened to "Latex condom" (he must have run into those hooked on phonetics guys). As sales rose, so did his wealth and he was ready to strike out on his own.
In the middle 1910s he opened South California Research University as a new place for people to get educated. Thanks to all the sales he made to stars like Fatty Arbuckle, he actually was able to keep tuition very low. His university's enrollment took off right away and pretty soon he was drawing lots of students away from UCLA.
The U-Cal system and the governor were not pleased by this great sucking sound. Latechs got more aggressive. He even opened up a Study A Broad program, set in Greece. Since this was an exchange program, this upset the U-Cal system as they thought he was bringing in unqualified students through the back door.
After much frustration over the program, Latechs was forced to break off. His friends even ribbed him about it.
The state finally moved in and made Latechs an excellent offer and so he sold the South California Research University to the state. The state renamed the school The University of Southern California and that's what we know it as today, the world's first state-owned directional school. They've had enough success over the years that people don't even realize that they come from the same pedigree as schools like East Carolina, Georgia Southern, and South Dakota.
Latechs only had one condition for the sale: he wanted his business acknowledged somehow. So that is why the USC teams, even to this day, are known as the Trojans.