Pac-12 Tuesday: The Golden Bear Effect - How A Cal Win Over USC Changed Everything

The 108th and hopefully-not-final season of Pac-12 Conference football kicks off this Saturday when USC hosts San Jose State. In recognition of the league’s illustrious lineage and in preparation for an uncertain future, I am dedicating this space each Tuesday throughout the football and basketball seasons to a memorable moment from its history.

January 2004: The Asthon Kutcher vehicle The Butterfly Effect debuts in theaters, one week removed from LSU beating Oklahoma for the Bowl Championship Series title and Associated Press voters naming USC their national champion.

The Butterfly Effect depicts how a young man with the ability to change time is tortured by the cataclysmic impact a seemingly small alteration to his life’s timeline has on reality. The titular “butterfly effect” is a concept explored as a gag in an episode of The Simpson: Treehouse of Horror that essentially, something so insignificant as killing a butterfly while time-traveling can entirely reshape the Earth’s course.

USC opens the 2023 in Week 0 against a Bay Area opponent, San Jose State, marking the beginning of the Trojans’ final season in the Pac-12. USC’s exit for the Big Ten marks a byproduct in college football’s landscape shift as a direct result of the College Football Playoff and leagues vis a vis television partners consolidating programs to earn postseason revenue.

Let’s take it back to Sept. 2003 and Berkeley for USC’s last loss until 2006, and one of the most significant moments leading to the formation of a college football playoff.

A month prior to Cal welcoming the Trojans to Strawberry Canyon, the Golden Bears played in one of the last editions of the BCA Classic — more on that for Press Break readers later this week.

Cal opened the season in Kansas City on Week 0 facing seventh-ranked Kansas State. Golden Bears head coach and noted quarterback whisperer Jeff Tedford was between NFL first-rounders, with Kyle Boller having been selected No. 19 overall four months prior and Aaron Rodgers a few weeks away from making his first start.

Rodgers played in the opener at Arrowhead Stadium and completed 9-of-13 pass attempts for 121 yards and a touchdown. Reggie Robertson handled the bulk of the work, however, throwing for 257 yards and three touchdowns.

The Cal defense was no match for K-State’s offense, however, with dual-threat quarterback Ell Roberson putting up four total touchdowns — three passing, one rushing — and Darren Sproles rolling up 175 rushing yards and a touchdown.

Pitt wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald probably should have won the Heisman Trophy in 2003, but I’d have had no issue with Sproles taking the prize from Manhattan to Manhattan. And that there were two standout candidates for the award who lost out to Oklahoma quarterback Jason White makes it all the more frustrating, even two decades later.

And the Sooners being rewarded when they maybe shouldn’t is a recurring theme of the 2003 campaign.

K-State bookended its regular season in Arrowhead Stadium with a 42-28 defeat of Cal in Week 0, then blasted Oklahoma in the Big 12 Championship Game, 35-7. Sproles went absolutely wild, averaging nearly 11 yards a touch on his 22 carries and catching three passes for 88 yards with a touchdown.

It remains one of the most impressive individual performances I’ve ever watched live.

As the Big 12 Championship unfolded, and USC handled its business the same day with a 52-28 rout of Oregon State to cap its eighth straight win, I assumed the Bowl Championship Series title game was locked: USC would end the Pac-10’s run of being locked out from the Championship, undoing the injustice of Nebraska advancing to the 2002 Rose Bowl Game ahead of Oregon, and the Trojans would have an opportunity to bookend their season with wins over the Southeastern Conference.

USC kicked off the 2003 season one week after K-State vs. Cal, blanking Auburn on the Plains, 23-0. I figured that while the Tigers had fallen out of the Top 25 with a late-October loss to LSU, scoring such an emphatic win in SEC territory would matter for BCS Championship purposes.

And it did. A year later.

Now, the fledgling BCS wasn’t without controversy in its first few seasons. Though the first two editions were faced with outsider dilemmas by virtue of Tulane and Marshall running the table in both 1998 and 1999, the Championship Games came together quite neatly.

But the title-game controversies of 2000, when Florida State went ahead of Miami despite losing a head-to-head matchup; and 2001, when Nebraska advanced ahead of Oregon despite not winning the Big 12 Conference served to almost instantly invalidate the BCS for its expressed purposes.

Because controversies already discredited the system in multiple seasons before 2003 and 2004, it wouldn’t be fair to suggest those seasons or any one game from them were the wound that began a decade-long bleeding-out process for the BCS.

Certain games did deliver especially critical blows, however, and USC at Cal on Sept. 27, 2003 was one such blow.

The 34-31 overtime thriller is noteworthy for several reasons that are oft-repeated every year when the Trojans and Golden Bears lock up. Since this season’s meeting may be the last for a very long while, however, the bullet-points are worth repeating:

• This was USC’s last loss until the historic 2006 Rose Bowl Game against Texas — and that it was the Longhorns responsible for snapping the Trojans’ 34-game winning streak is meaningful for the connection to Cal. UT coach Mack Brown publicly campaigned for his Longhorns to receive an invite to the previous year’s Rose Bowl, which would have been the Golden Bears’ first in a half-century.

  
  That drought continues today.
  

• USC didn’t lose another Pac-10 game for 37 months when it dropped a decision at Oregon State on Oct. 28, 2006, by an almost identical score: 33-31. The Trojans won 27 conference games between the two losses.
  

• Cal went 15 years between wins of the Trojans, and 18 before beating USC in Berkeley again. I was covering the 2018 game when the Golden Bears snapped the streak, and it was surreal to think the players in that contest would have been first-graders, Kindergartners and toddlers during the 2003 classic.
  

• Aaron Rodgers made just his second start for Cal in this win. Though the NFL Most Valuable Player and frequent sayer-of-kookie-things-to-Pat McAfee played against K-State, Southern Miss and Utah, it wasn’t until after Rodgers threw for a pair of touchdowns in a loss to the Urban Meyer-coached Utes that he claimed the job.

“It’s been an interesting two months,” Rodgers said at Cal media availability after the announcement was made on Sept. 17, days before a meeting with Illinois. “My patience definitely was tested. I had to refocus every day in practice.”

If Immaculate Grid ever rolls out a square asking “anxiously toiled behind both Reggie Robertson and Brett Favre on depth charts,” Aaron Rodgers is your answer.

With 263 yards passing and a touchdown, Rodgers won his debut at Illinois — the first of many times he’d run roughshod over a team from the Land of Lincoln that wears blue and orange.

It was a promising first start, though not necessarily foreshadowing the Canton-bound career to come for Rodgers. You couldn’t even really deem Rodgers a future superstar after the USC game, despite throwing for two touchdowns and opening the contest with a rushing score.

That’s because Rodgers, taking hits from a stout USC defense, didn’t play in the fourth quarter or overtime. Reggie Robertson emerged as a hero.

“I was prepared, Robertson told the Oakland Tribune. "I feel great now. No. 3 USC, national TV, everybody on our team juiced. I have so much energy.”

Jonathan Makonnen, who went up for a touchdown on a Saturday for a second-overtime touchdown reception and 104 yards, said after the game that the Trojans didn’t take Cal seriously and that USC’s lack of respect gave the less talented Golden Bears an opening to exploit.

While USC would regroup to go undefeated in conference for the next three years, Makonnen unknowingly predicted something that would become a nagging, repeated detriment to the Trojans program for several years running after the 2000s dynasty ended.

On that day in 2003, however, it was a wake-up call for USC and coach Pete Carroll. Carroll told reporters the loss and effort were “disappointing.” Just how disappointing wouldn’t be evident until December when the 34-31 overtime loss was what kept USC out of the BCS Championship Game despite being ranked No. 1 in the Associated Press Top 25 poll — foreshadowing the Trojans’ claim to a split national championship that did more to discredit the BCS than any development prior.