The relationship between USC and Oklahoma as football programs and as football communities is a constant point of interest in Los Angeles and Norman.
Tensions between these two schools have rarely existed over the broader scope of college football history. Tensions briefly emerged in the 2003 and 2004 college football seasons. In the 2003 season, OU took what should have been USC’s spot in the BCS National Championship Game at the 2004 Sugar Bowl in New Orleans against LSU. In the 2004 season, OU and USC met on the field in the title game at the 2005 Orange Bowl in Miami.
That’s pretty much it.
These teams did meet in a memorable 1981 game in the Los Angeles Coliseum — a game which helped Marcus Allen win the Heisman Trophy — and they met in Norman as the other half of the home-and-home series. However, neither school was at its very best in those two years. Nebraska was the best Big Eight program at the time, and Washington was the best Pac-10 program at the very end of John Robinson’s first go-round at USC.
For several decades, USC and Oklahoma fans didn’t really have cause or reason to constantly compare themselves to the other.
As soon as Lincoln Riley made the move from Norman to Los Angeles in November of 2021, that all changed. Today, every game and every season offer reason for the schools, their fans, and their beat writers and commentators to look at the other side and see what’s going on.
In 2022, USC had the obvious and substantial upper hand. The Trojans won 11 games while Brent Venables had to sort through a mess with the Sooners.
In 2023, everything has flipped. OU looks like a rising power while USC is in a state of disrepair.
USC fans might not want to admit it, but if they’re facing reality, they have to: Oklahoma fans, at least for 2023, were right about Lincoln Riley. Let’s go through these details — not to stir up emotions, but to maybe learn something about what Riley has to do to get USC back on track: