Carroll refuses to shake hands with Chip Kelly.

To the vastness of pundits that predicted USC would destroy Oregon, I have two words for you:

SCOREBOARD BABY!!

By now, you've already read the stats ad nauseum so there is really no point in going over them in detail again.  One of the things I want to discuss is the crowd.

Now, Barkley says that the crowd didn't affect him and in the first half, I might have to agree with him.  But this game is a tale of two halves.  In the first half, as long as USC was in it, Barkley seemed to be okay, but in the second half as Oregon started to get further and further ahead, Barkley seemed to be falling apart...

Barkley ended the game with 21-38 passing and a garbage int.   That is about 55% of his passes completed with 187 yards.  Conversely, Masoli 19-31-0 or about 61% and 222 Yards.  That equates to 8.9 yards per completion for Barkley and 11.7 yards per completion for Masoli.  The other stat that is very telling per the crowd is this:

USC had 6 missed starts.

I initially expected something along the lines of 28-19 for a final score.  Not in my wildest senior moments did I expect that the 28-19 would turn out to be the combined score just for Oregon.

So, in the final analysis of the crowd mostly in black, regardless of what Barkley says, the crowd affected him and his OL.

Now on to something that just torques me to no end.  

If Chip Kelly had just sauntered out to midfield to shake hands with Pete Carroll, there would have be no Pete Carroll (ala 2007 with Mike Belotti) to shake hands with.

Instead, Chip Kelly had to run, (mind you for the elegantly portly CK, that might have been a heath risk, I know I'm elegantly portly too), run to catch Carroll before he went into the tunnel and even then it appeared to this blogger that Carroll was trying to brush off Kelly.  It looked like it required Kelly to grab a hold of Carroll in order to whisper something in to Carroll's ear.

I dont' know if it's because this was the fourth consecutive loss in the great State of Oregon for the Trojans, or if Carroll just has a hard time with not winning.  No one likes to lose, but it is a sign of a true champion to be humble in victory and gracious in defeat.  Carroll has always seemed to be gloating in victory and sorely in defeat  - at least where Oregon is concerned.

This has been a sore spot for Oregon fans since at least 2007 and bless Chip Kelly, he was more of a man, forcing himself on Pete Carroll, if for no other reason than to try and save Carroll's rep with the Oregon fans.  I mean, even if Carroll thought that Chip Kelly was running up the score (remember last year USC won 44-10 - a 34 point margin and with just under 2 minutes left in the game, Mustain threw a 59 yard TD pass to Ausberry - effectively running up the score), that didn't rise to the level of being crass.

But what Chip Kelly did was the very definition of what a champion should be doing.  That is the character that Chip Kelly has imputed upon his players, and while a stray gets away once in a while, generally the rest of the pack seems to echo that very definition of what a Kelly champion should be.

Apparently I am not the only one to notice this after I did a Google search and many other seems to have seen the same thing, so I'm not having a dementia moment.

Finally, if a coach epitomizes the character of the team, then the following must be true:

Kelly = Oregon Ducks = Class.
Carroll = USC = Classless.

I am sorry for the USC fans, I think Rome is . . .err. . . Troy is burning.