ROSE BOWL : Critics Silent, but the Trojans Pick Up Slack After 20-17 Win

The members of USC’s football team would like to take this moment to dedicate their upset win over Ohio State Tuesday to all the editors who wrote their Rose Bowl headlines while Christmas shopping.

This win, the Trojans made perfectly clear, was for all the fans who turned their Ted Tollner autograph picture face down on the coffee table after the Trojans’ loss to Notre Dame.

So the Trojans didn’t deserve to be here, huh? So running through the USC defense was going to be as easy as tying your shoe, huh?

“Some guy said this could be the worst USC team that ever went to the Rose Bowl,” Trojan linebacker Duane Bickett said. “What kind of bleep is that?”

The Buckeyes found out Tuesday. USC beat Ohio State, 20-17, and the Trojans couldn’t wait to meet the press afterward.

They were seeking out all the doubting Thomases. They couldn’t wait to say “we told you so” to anyone who would listen.

And where was that writer who predicted in print that the Trojans would lose by 38 points?

With this, the Trojans are hoping that every one will forget that they warmed up for this game by losing their final two regular-season games to UCLA and Notre Dame. They hope this will prove that when the Trojans feel like playing, they can beat anyone.

“That’s the way we’ve been playing all season,” cornerback Tommy Haynes said of his team’s performance, “but we’ve been ridiculed by people who just don’t know the Trojans.”

The Buckeyes know the Trojans all too well.

Ohio State and the nation’s leading rusher, Keith Byars, were expected to wear this little Pacific 10 team down and put it away by the middle of the second quarter.

But it didn’t happen. Byars must feel like he spent the day in USC’s defensive huddle. Every time he touched the ball, the Trojans formed a circle around him and wouldn’t let him out.

“What you saw out there was USC defense,” said Haynes, who had two interceptions. “It was nothing fancy, there were no magic potions, we just played defense.”

Byars, the Heisman Trophy runner-up, gained 109 yards on 23 carries. But 50 of those yards came on one run in the first quarter. Take away that gain and Byars averaged just 2.2 yards on 22 carries.

How did the Trojans do it?

“It was our idea to swarm him on every play and get 11 hands on the ball,” Haynes said.

Eleven hands?

“I told everyone that the only way to stop him is to get eight or nine guys on him every time he touches the ball,” Bickett said. Defensive tackle Brent Moore: “We wanted to hit him with six people at once.”

Although opinions differed on how many Trojans it takes to tackle a Keith Byars, the results were all that seemed to matter.

“We knew if we could control Byars that we could get them into their passing game,” linebacker Neil Hope said. “We knew if we could rattle (quarterback Mike) Tomczak he might throw the ball up for grabs. And that’s what happened.”

Tomczak threw three interceptions, two leading directly to USC touchdowns. The USC front line sacked Tomczak four times and the Trojan secondary was effective and intimidating. On one play in the second quarter, safety Tim McDonald (6-3, 205) violently flung Byars (6-2, 233) to the turf.

No, this wasn’t the team that played dead against UCLA and Notre Dame.

“We just didn’t have that same feeling against those teams,’ said Moore, who thwarted a late Buckeye rally when he stripped the ball out of Tomczak’s hand, forcing him to absorb a nine-yard loss. “I can’t explain it.” The Trojans clinched the Pac-10 title and the right to be in the Rose Bowl before those games.

The Trojans had that feeling Tuesday. And they wanted to share it with the world.

“Respect doesn’t come easy around here,” Hope said. “Everyone likes to write us off. They said no one could stop Byars. But one guy can’t beat a whole team.”