It’s family over football for USC’s McDonald

What the USC football team did last Saturday night had national title implications. What USC radio commentator Paul McDonald did had father of the year implications.

The Trojans defeated Notre Dame and now only have to beat UCLA Saturday to advance to the BCS national championship game.

Despite the importance of the Notre Dame game, McDonald missed it in order to attend his 19-year-old daughter Stephanie’s debutante ball.

Last summer, McDonald’s wife, Allyson, said to him, “You know, Stephanie’s debutante ball is the same night USC plays Notre Dame. You are going to the ball, aren’t you?”

Said McDonald: “Of course I am.”

And he meant it.

“There will be other USC-Notre Dame games,” McDonald said this week. “Your daughter only has one debutante ball. Next to a wedding, it is the next biggest deal in their lives.”

Debutante balls are a tradition created by the 80-year-old National Charity League. The one in which Stephanie and 24 other young women were honored was put on by the organization’s Newport chapter and was held at the Irvine Hyatt.

McDonald said that Stephanie and her fellow debutantes collectively had performed about 6,700 hours of charity work during their junior high and high school years.

Mothers are closely involved with their daughters during six years of charity work. The debutante ball, a very formal affair, is the fathers’ night. Among other things, the first dance belongs to Dad.

The McDonalds have three sons -- Mike, a junior backup quarterback at USC who starred at Newport Harbor High, Andrew, a sophomore quarterback at Newport Harbor who is out because of a broken collarbone, and Matthew, a second-grader.

Of Matthew, McDonald said, “I told Jeff Brinkley, the coach at Newport Harbor, that he’s got one more coming.”

Stephanie is a freshman at Orange Coast College and plans to transfer to USC next fall.

“There was never a question about attending her debutante ball,” McDonald said. “I could see it in her eyes. They told me that after all the years of putting up with the boys’ sporting events, this was the bare minimum that I could do for her.”

Sideline reporter John Jackson moved into the booth last weekend to fill in for McDonald and Suzy Shuster took Jackson’s spot.

McDonald won’t be missing Saturday’s game against UCLA. He’ll be back in his regular spot, working alongside play-by-play announcer Pete Arbogast.

UCLA radio commentator Matt Stevens hasn’t missed any big games, but last year during USC-UCLA week he thought he was missing his SUV.

After leaving a Home Depot, he walked up to a Ford Explorer that looked exactly like his, except for one minor detail.

“The license plate frame read, ‘Fight On SC!’ ” Stevens said. “So I knew it wasn’t mine. I searched around for another Explorer for 15 minutes and was about to call the police.”

But then his girlfriend, Andrea Rodriguez, called him and he told her his story.

“She started laughing hysterically,” Stevens said. “She said, ‘You idiot, you’ve been driving around with that license plate frame for the last three days.’ ”

Stevens said Rodriguez, a big USC fan, was responsible.

Her prank is apparently not original. When McDonald heard about it, he said, “Same thing happened to me about seven or eight years ago. Some UCLA friends of mine put a UCLA license plate frame on my car.”

Said Stevens: “Leave it to a Trojan to always have to top a Bruin.”

The TV announcers on the ABC telecast of Saturday’s game will again be Brent Musburger, Bob Davie and Kirk Herbstreit.

At one point, it appeared as though former Bruins quarterback David Norrie would be working the game with his ABC-ESPN play-by-play partner Mark Jones. But those two have been assigned Rutgers-West Virginia, which will be on ESPN Saturday at 4:45 p.m.

“I would have loved to have done USC-UCLA but we still got a big game,” Norrie said.

It would have been bigger had Rutgers not lost to Cincinnati.

FSN Prime Ticket will have a special pregame show live from the Rose Bowl at 12:30 p.m. Saturday, with Lindsay Soto serving as host. The regional cable network will also have extensive postgame coverage.

John Robinson and Terry Donahue will be working with play-by-play announcer Tom Dillon on the national radio coverage of the USC-UCLA game. But it will not be carried in Los Angeles because of the coverage on UCLA flagship station 570, which now uses its old call letters KLAC, and USC flagship KSPN 710.

One of the highlights of 570’s extensive pregame coverage should be an interview Stevens plans to do with former UCLA guard Jim McCullough at around 12:30 p.m. McCullough was the honorary captain for UCLA when it lost a heartbreaker to USC, 17-13, in 1985 at the Coliseum.

McCullough was so upset that he decided to walk back to his apartment in Westwood.

His parents followed him in their car about halfway before his father convinced him that wasn’t such a good idea.

McCullough will be the Bruins’ honorary captain Saturday.

Stevens is among the few people in L.A. who are predicting an upset by UCLA. “I think the UCLA defense can keep them in the game, and because it’s at the Rose Bowl, UCLA will pull off the upset.”

larry.stewart@latimes.com