USC Not Looking at a Laugher

It was vintage John Robinson in a season that has had too few opportunities for laughs.

Late in Robinson’s weekly media luncheon, a simple question arose: Is there a chance USC’s players could overlook Oregon State this week?

Robinson waited a beat, then delivered, his comic timing intact.

“Not if they went to any of our other games.”

No, not if they were at the Coliseum when Nevada Las Vegas made Robinson sweat out his 100th victory. Not if they were there when Oregon’s 36-yard field-goal attempt fell a foot shy of an upset in the final seconds.

“Not the way this season has been for us,” Robinson said.

Still, a winning season and a chance for USC to go to a bowl game hang on the outcome of today’s game against Oregon State, with the UCLA game a week away.

Look past the 3-6 Beavers, who haven’t won a Pacific 10 Conference game all season? USC had best not.

The Trojans’ 45-21 victory over Stanford might have been a season saver, but only if USC (5-4, 3-3) sustains its level of play despite the injury to new quarterback Mike Van Raaphorst.

Former starter John Fox takes his place, and will have the assistance of USC’s new turbocharged offense with cornerback Daylon McCutcheon and former safety Chad Morton at his disposal.

Was the Stanford game a turnaround or an anomaly? Today should give an indication.

“We’ve been up and down,” Robinson said. “We played a good first game, not so good in our second. We had a horrible half against Arizona State and a horrible offensive game against Washington. That’s kind of our season.

“And the ones we’ve won, we haven’t been a dominant team. [Stanford] was probably the only game that any of us had a sigh of relief. I don’t think there’s anybody on our team that doesn’t take this game seriously.”

Oregon State has a 10-game conference losing streak, and the Beavers haven’t beaten USC since 1967--when the Oregon State “Giant Killers” upset the Trojans, 3-0, handing eventual national champion USC its only loss of the season.

Oregon State Coach Mike Riley, the former USC offensive coordinator who took over the Beaver program this season, was a Corvallis teenager in 1967. His father, Bud, was an Oregon State assistant coach for the team that not only beat undefeated USC, but tied highly ranked UCLA and upset a powerful Purdue team in a 7-2-1 season.

The day of the USC game, Riley was in the stands.

“I have some vague memories of a guy named Jess Lewis chasing O.J. Simpson down on what appeared to be a breakaway run,” he said. “I just have a picture of that day. Kind of a November Oregon day and a packed house and a big game and a lot of excitement, which is probably what I think about most. . . . It was a tremendous year for the Beavers.”

There haven’t been many since. The Beavers haven’t managed a winning season since 1970, but Riley has undertaken the formidable task of changing things.

Oregon State has come close to breaking the Pac-10 streak this season, losing to Stanford, 27-24, on the last play of the game and losing to Arizona State by three points as well after a late drive was killed by consecutive fumbles on third and fourth downs with less than a yard to go.

Robinson has taken note.

“It’s not a game where you’re going to be up, 21-0,” he said. “Washington was behind, UCLA was behind, Arizona State was behind. That’s the kind of game we anticipate, and that’s the kind of game I think we’ll have.”

In Tim Alexander, the Beavers have a versatile but inconsistent quarterback, but the Oregon State running game has been held under 100 yards for four consecutive weeks.

The defense has impressed Robinson, although a series of injuries has hurt the Beavers.

“To me, the defense is maybe the third- or fourth-best in the conference,” Robinson said. “It doesn’t have those numbers because the offense hasn’t been able to help them out. But they have played very hard and are fundamentally sound.”

Riley’s job is trying to make Oregon State football fundamentally sound.

“I think that if I were to summarize our season, I’d say this team started to establish an identity of competing and playing hard and being pretty sound and giving ourselves a chance to be in games and win games,” he said. “We kind of won the games that probably people suspected we had the best opportunity to win, and we had some other great opportunities that we didn’t quite capitalize on.

“Now, we need a breakthrough game. We need something that gets us over the hump so we can believe and go on and hopefully continue to grow. That’s how I see us. We have two big games left. Obviously the most important one is the one that is right on us, which is SC.”

Robinson wishes Riley well, but that breakthrough game doesn’t need to come against USC.

“We’re looking at two very important games for us,” he said. “Any of you who have been in the Northwest in November, it isn’t so much that the weather is bad, but they are hard places to play.

“The thing about these games that causes problems is you go there thinking, ‘Oh, God, it’s going to rain. . . . ‘ You wind up talking yourself into a bad game as opposed to being positive.

“We won a Rose Bowl berth up there two years ago, and we were very positive and tried very hard and it was not easy. . . . Our trips to Pullman [Wash.] have never been easy and it’s a similar place. You just have to go and win the damn game. It’s much more important to approach it that way than to say, ‘You better not overlook these guys,’ and plant the seed.”

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TODAY’S GAME

USC at OREGON STATE

Time: 1 p.m.

TV: None

Radio: KLSX-FM (97.1)