When invincibles go down...

I did my schooling at TVS Lakshmi in Madurai. The school, back then & I am assuming still is, very popular for the high number of students it churns out who score above the magical number of 1100 out of a possible 1200 in the higher secondary exams. The year after I passed out, I met a school junior on the way and asked him how much did he score. He said he had scored 1155 but is still ranked somewhere around 25th in the school. That statement best explained the amazing regularity with which our school used to produce 1100+ scores. But then there was a reason why our school was able to accomplish this: the students that the school admits in the 11th standard. What used to happen was most of the toppers in the 10th standard exams from other schools in Madurai would switch schools and join our school for 11standard, mainly bcos of the reputation our school enjoyed. Thus our school literally didn't have to do anything special to produce that kind of results. The students pretty much took care of the results themselves. And that exactly was why when people used to talk about my school in glowing terms, I used to feel uncomfortable bcos IMHO, the school just didn't deserve all the credit it was getting.

Reason I am bringing all that here, where I actually wanted to write about the USC loss yday is simple: USC pretty much does the same when it comes to recruiting for its football team. Many of the highly talked about football players coming out of high school in America end up signing for USA. I remember looking at the list of top 10 prospects in the country for each one of the positions in the Souts.com site (that ranks high school players across all sports) in 2005 and atleast 3-4 players (out of that 10) for each position had committed playing for USC. Thus is their dominance when it comes to recruiting. It is said that the 4th string running back of USC can start at RB at any other college in the US. That is how strong they are. And that is exactly the reason why I hate USC - they recruit the best players in the country and then proudly tout themselves as the best team in the nation.

Going to their game against Oregon State yday as 25-point favorites, nobody was expecting what ultimately happened last night. The Beavers just stunned the college football world with their victory over the Trojans and throwing the national championhip game wide open. And you could not have found a happier person than yours truly last night, as nothing gives me more pleasure than watching USC lose. Last night was exactly one reason why I love watching college football even more than I do watching NFL. The sheer unpredictability and the fact that all it takes is one game to screw up your entire season, like the way USC did to their 2008 season yday.