You can get behind this team

LA Daily News - Sports

Kevin Modesti, Columnist

EUGENE, Ore. - The Trojans displayed a glaring weakness Saturday, but not in Autzen Stadium, against the Ducks. This was in the cramped locker room, after the game.

USC's sloganeering needs work.

"You can't win a game in the first half," said Matt Leinart, the Heisman Trophy quarterback, after a USC comeback victory over Oregon that didn't look like one on the scoreboard.

"It takes all four quarters to win a game," said Reggie Bush, the Heisman Trophy hopeful at tailback.

"Every game, we say, 'The game's not won in the first quarter,' " said Darnell Bing, the strong safety.

Well, which is it, Trojan maxim-makers?

Clearly they're a long way from slapping a copyright on those words to live by and raking in the T-shirt loot.

Fortunately for them, however many different wordings their motto goes through in the typical round of post-game interviews, they remain perfectly clear on the meaning.

Returning to an old script on this gorgeous Saturday evening in Eugene, the Trojans messed around and fell behind Oregon by 13 points before dusting off the various versions of the verity that football games are 60 minutes long.

Then they went out in the second half and completed a 45-13 victory, coming as close as humanly possible to quieting 59,129 Oregon fans, showing the largest crowd in the history of the sport in this state why the Trojans are the No. 1 college team in the land.

It's easy to forget that last season, when they went undefeated and repeated as national champions, the Trojans trailed at some stage in seven of their 13 games. Even the Orange Bowl, when they gave up the first touchdown to Oklahoma - before scoring the next seven touchdowns.

Against Virginia Tech, BYU, Stanford, Oregon State, Arizona and Notre Dame, the Trojans were down at least briefly. Most days, they won going away.

"We'd been in this position before," Leinart said Saturday evening.

It says here that this is the scariest thing about Pete Carroll's team, which is off to a 3-0 start this season after winning its 25th game in a row, matching the USC and Pacific-10 Conference records.

They can win big. They can win from behind. They can win big from behind.

I mean, what's more impressive? A highlight-reel display like the Trojans put on when they scored touchdowns on 10 of their first 11 possessions against Arkansas last week at the Coliseum, or a slow-burning drama like they acted out when they got off the floor against 24th-ranked Oregon?

I agree with Oscar Lua, the Trojans' middle linebacker, the defensive heart and soul who also is an interested observer of the offense.

"It's much more impressive when they're down, and a big crowd is screaming at them, and they wind up putting up 45 points," Lua said at midfield right after the game. "I'd give the offense a grade of 'A' after overcoming that much adversity."

It was self-inflicted adversity. The Trojans' first five attempts to control the ball ended badly. An Oregon punt caromed off William Buchanan's foot and the Ducks recovered, a Leinart pass went through Dwayne Jarrett's hands and was intercepted, a fourth-down Leinart pass sailed out of bounds, and a pair of third-down Leinart misfires led to punts.

Leinart was missing, Bush wasn't breaking loose, and penalties were killing the Trojans. Only because the defense was holding up more than its end of the bargain did the Ducks lead only 13-0 after 21 minutes.

Unlike the Arkansas game, where the Trojans scored in long bursts, they needed a pair of long drives to get the Leinart-to-Bush 19-yard touchdown pass and 36-yard Mario Danelo field goal that made it 13-0 at halftime.

On Friday, a local talk-show host on the rental-car radio had pleaded with the Autzen fans to get back to their seats in time for the second-half kickoff after a break to "relubricate" their vocal cords. The point was to not permit the Trojans one minute of peace at the Pac-10's noisiest field.

The man needn't have worried about the fans at Saturday's game. As the second half began, they were at their stations, eager to see if the Ducks could be the Trojans' spoilers.

The next time the fans had a chance to look up at the scoreboard, the Trojans had scored 31 straight points in 19 minutes, 58 seconds, and the string of routs that began with the 36-point margin against Oklahoma on Jan. 4 had been stretched to include 46 over Hawaii, 53 over Arkansas and 32 over Oregon.

How to phrase it?

"It's a tradition we have at USC," Lua said. "We're a second-half team."