Cardinal Pride! Stanford 24, USC 23!

There is an old adage that any team game ,whatever it is, is not played on paper: that no matter now good your opponent is going into the fray, they still have to take the field with the regulation number of players and they have to beat you.

Often, in a lobsided match-up, its a foregone conclusion. But sometimes, when a team that the experts think isn't supposed to even be out there on the field, something unexpected happens. A guy makes a great play. A team gells together at just the right time. A dominating player or two has an off-day or a team and its coach get caught "looking ahead" to a game in one or two weeks and just isn't ready to play hard enough to stop a determined pack of underdogs.

Stanford 24, (No. 2) USC 23!

Some are calling this the biggest upset in the history of Pacific-10 Football. It could be.

It can't be often that the Number Two-ranked team in national college football gets beat by another team that was not only unranked (not in the Top 25) but was a forty-one (!) point underdog according to the football experts in Vegas or Atlantic City or wherever the oddsmakers do their job. USC under Pete Carroll is considered one of the best football programs in history. They have dominated opponents for the last few years. They had won 35 consecutive home games. This Cardinal game was suposed to be a bump in the road before they faced their biggest challenge against the mighty California Bears.

Now it's the undefeated Cal Bears who are ranked Number Two in the country. (Of course, they haven't played Stanford. That's still to come.)

Oh, a couple other points about this game:

The underdogs beat the mighty USC Trojans on Number Two's home field...And if that wasn't enough for real-life drama:

Fiirst year Standford coach Jim Harbaugh, a former NFL Quarterback, had to use a second stringer at QB. Travita Pritchard (above) had only thrown one completed pass in a college game before.

Oh, and, Mark Bradford, the wide-receiver who caught the pass that won the game for Stanford--he had just lost his father a couple weeks earlier and dedicated this game for his dad.

If somebody had made this as a movie, many viewers would have said it was too corny to believe.

The mighty Southern Cal Trojans, in what has to be one of the biggest upset in PAC-10 football history, went down hard to Stanford last Saturday night.

I only wish Wilson Slater, my father-in-law and a former Stanford alum, had been alive to see this. He was a very nice gentleman who worked for years as a business manager for the Medford (Oregon) School District. He and Shirley's mom, June, traveled hundreds of miles from Medford down to Stanford Stadium in California's Bay Area to see all the Stanford football home games for over twenty odd years. In great seasons, passable and bad ones, he went there five or six times a year, sitting in the same seats near his friends to cheer on the old Alma Mater.

I'll bet he's "up there" right now, taking it all in with his fellow alumni.

Stanford football has had a lot of frustrating seasons in the last decade, but I think this will make up for a lot of that. And I'm sure USC is still the better team--on paper, that is!