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LOS ANGELES — Pete Arbogast, USC’s longtime play-by-play broadcaster, reveled in the sight at the Rose Bowl.
It was 10 years ago, during the final weekend of the regular season, when the Trojans were to face UCLA in their annual matchup.
“The color has come back to Southern California,” Arbogast declared early in the radio broadcast.
A tradition had been restored.
Below from Arbogast’s perch in the stadium press box, the teams were wearing their home jerseys, the visiting Trojans in cardinal red and the home Bruins in powder blue.
“There’s nothing like it,” Arbogast said this week. “It never should have stopped in the first place.”
For decades, USC and UCLA were pitted against each other in their home-color jerseys, a result of sharing the Coliseum as their home stadium. It was, after all, a home game for both teams.
The arrangement was not only popular among alumni and fans, but it served as a defining stylistic feature of the crosstown rivalry to observers across the nation as the uniforms’ contrasting colors glistened in the late autumn sunshine and popped on TV sets.
But soon after the Bruins moved their home games to the Rose Bowl in 1982, new NCAA rules required visiting teams to wear their white jerseys.
For more than two decades, the tradition faded until the Trojans broke the rule in 2008, arriving in Pasadena in cardinal jerseys after former coach Pete Carroll hatched a pre-game agreement with former UCLA coach Rick Neuheisel.
At kickoff, the Trojans were penalized a timeout. Neuheisel responded by voluntarily calling a timeout to even the score in a show of sportsmanship.
Two months later, the NCAA Football Rules Committee passed a rule allowing teams to wear uniforms of contrasting colors, prompted by the 2008 USC-UCLA game.
The setup has remained since, with the exception of their 2011 meeting in which the Bruins wore all-white alternate uniforms, and is renewed with the 88th edition of the crosstown rivalry on Saturday at the Rose Bowl.
The current coaches said this week that they liked the jersey tradition in the city rivalry, their campuses separated by little more than 12 miles – or 20 minutes to an hour’s worth of traffic along the 10 Freeway.
“It’s home for both of us,” USC coach Clay Helton said. “I think it’s a great statement by both universities to allow each other to wear their home uniforms.”
“Both teams have iconic uniforms,” UCLA coach Chip Kelly said. “You can instantly look at a TV and look up and know that’s ’SC or that’s UCLA. I think it’s really cool. It’s a neat tradition and I’m glad they have it. There’s a couple schools that have iconic uniforms, USC, UCLA, Penn State, Alabama.”
The tradition’s revival came when Carroll, the popular Trojans’ coach, sparked the idea in 2008.
“From talking to coaches at UCLA over the years and seeing the teams wear their home jerseys growing up, it’s something we’re going to start up again this weekend,” Carroll said during rivalry week in 2008 when he announced plans to have the Trojans wear cardinal uniforms on his website. “This has always been a colorful match-up and we hope everyone enjoys this recognition of both the past and the present state of the rivalry.”
It added color to a rivalry that was lacking for drama. The Trojans were 11-1 at the time of the crosstown rivalry and favored by nearly five touchdowns as they were headed toward a fourth consecutive Rose Bowl game come January. Meanwhile, the Bruins were struggling in their first season under Neuheisel and entered only 4-7.
“If you know Pete, if there’s a way to compete for anything, a way to make it a little more special, a little bit more unique, he was going to try to do that,” said Yogi Roth, the Pac-12 Networks analyst who was then an assistant for the Trojans.
Little suspense followed in the game.
The Trojans handed UCLA a 28-7 defeat, led by quarterback Mark Sanchez, who passed 269 yards and two touchdowns, and a record-setting defense that featured the linebacker trio of Brian Cushing, Clay Matthews and Rey Maualuga. It was USC’s ninth win in 10 meetings in the crosstown rivalry, during a decade-run of dominance.
Roth reasoned Carroll’s interest in the uniform tradition was inspired by alumni. He shuttled the coach to various speaking engagements and fundraising events throughout the region during the spring and summer months, allowing him to connect with fans and “learn the ethos of the history of USC.”
“Pete had an incredible understanding of what mattered to the fans of the program,” Roth said. “And also what to share with the players in the program, how to maintain their focus and be able to balance all the hype and pageantry along with the, ‘Hey, just focus on this next step and this next day in practice.’”
Arbogast offered a similar assessment of Carroll.
“He’s very much about motivation and the rah-rah spirit of college football,” Arbogast said.
Ten years later, the return of the tradition has been a welcomed sight for a chorus of fans, as well as Arbogast, who first attended the rivalry games at the Coliseum during the 1960s.
“It was so normal to me growing up that it was nice to have it back,” Arbogast said. “That’s kind of how I felt about it. I was fired up to have it back to the way it should have been in the first place.”
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