There’s No Senior High for Trojans

The USC players were trudging off the field after last week’s loss to California when Petros Papadakis heard someone shout his name. The tailback glanced up to see a man standing above the tunnel that leads to the locker rooms.

The man yelled an epithet, Papadakis recalled, “and then he threw a bottle at me.”

In this disheartening season for the Trojans, the pain has been doubly sharp for Papadakis and the other seniors on the team. They hear booing fans a little more clearly. Each loss hurts a little more because they will not have another season to make up for this one.

So a fall that began with such promise, with three victories and a top-10 ranking, has become a muted last hurrah for veterans such as offensive lineman Brent McCaffrey, defensive tackle Ennis Davis and linebacker Zeke Moreno.

These players came to USC expecting a bowl game at the end of every season. They were recruited by John Robinson, the coach who led the Trojans to a national championship in 1978. Many of them--the fifth-year seniors--arrived soon after USC defeated Northwestern in the 1996 Rose Bowl.

Pasadena on New Year’s Day, they assumed, would be an annual event.

But they have not been there. Not once.

“That has been a big disappointment,” quarterback Mike Van Raaphorst said. “It’s tough leaving when you haven’t done that. You’d like to leave a better legacy.”

Instead, Van Raaphorst and his classmates had the bad timing to come to USC for the tail end of Robinson’s tenure. Next came the transition to a new coach, Paul Hackett, and an upset loss at the Sun Bowl.

This season, the Trojans are in danger of missing a bowl game for the fourth time in five years. At 3-5, they begin their stretch run with a game at Arizona State on Saturday.

The team can still salvage a winning season and qualify for a postseason berth, but, mired in a five-game losing streak, USC figures to be an underdog in most of the remaining games.

And the best the seniors can hope for is a low-level bowl game.

To their credit, they have continued to play hard and encourage younger teammates. There has been no sulking or finger pointing, none of the dissension that can accompany a losing streak.

“It is painful for me to see them go through this as hard as they work,” Hackett said. “That is the thing that makes me the most frustrated, makes me the most angry.”

For Moreno, it seems the reality has yet to hit home. In recent weeks, when talking to reporters, he has often paused to shake his head and mutter some variation of: “I can’t believe we’ve lost all these games.”

The losing might have hurt him in other ways. A preseason candidate for the Butkus Award--given each season to college football’s best linebacker--he has been dropped from consideration despite having more tackles than one semifinalist, Robert Thomas of UCLA, and as many tackles for loss as another, Adam Archuleta of Arizona State.

“It’s very clear to me that if we’re flying high, this guy has got to be one of the premier players in the country,” Hackett said.

At least Moreno and a few of his teammates--including Davis and linebacker Markus Steele--can look forward to the NFL.

Many of the seniors are entering the final month of their football-playing lives. For Papadakis, this time has been marked not only by a bottle-tossing fan but by classmates who want to tell him precisely what is wrong with his team.

“They go wild on me,” he said. “Even my friends call and talk about specific plays and why didn’t we do this or do that.”

At least the veterans have one thing going for them: the schedule.

No matter what happens in the next two games, they will finish the season, and their careers, against traditional rivals UCLA and Notre Dame. Davis imagines what it would feel like to win those games.

“It won’t make us completely happy and satisfied,” he said. “But it’s pretty much all we have left.”

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