The USC-Washington Pac-12 football rivalry has a point of commonality with the USC-Oregon football matchup. Very simply, Trojans-Huskies has rarely featured both programs at the height of their powers at the same time. Usually, both schools took turns being great. When one school was elite, the other fell off the pace.
When Washington won the national title in the early 1990s, USC wasn’t very good. When Pete Carroll built USC into a dynasty in the 2000s, Washington wasn’t good. When Washington had a run of success under Rick Neuheisel just before the Carroll era, USC was struggling. There haven’t been many long periods of time in which both schools were good. They were both good in 2016 and 2017, but that was just a two-year run.
If we want to find a six-year period in which USC and Washington were both really strong, you would have to go back to 1976. From 1976 through 1981, either USC or Washington won the Pac-10 and went to the Rose Bowl that season. USC won the 1977, 1979, and 1980 Rose Bowls. Washington won the 1978 and 1982 Rose Bowls while losing the 1981 Granddaddy.
We talked about this and more with UW Huskies Wire editor Roman Tomashoff. Here’s the show below:
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