USC's Booty aims to go home for BCS title
It was a throwaway question, really. A chance for John David Booty to have a little fun.
But the fifth-year USC senior, preparing for his last go-round on a Trojans team picked by every pundit with a prediction as the No. 1 team in the nation, doesn't take it.
Pausing to think through the innumerable interviews in his college career for "the dumbest question you've ever been asked," John David Booty, a Heisman Trophy hopeful, takes his answer to an unexpected place.
"I guess it's all the times people ask me, do I miss home?" the 22-year-old from Shreveport, La., said. "It's a question that almost answers itself. Of course I do."
Never more than this season.
Never more than in the middle of the summer with eight weeks to go before USC opens against Idaho on Sept. 1 at the Coliseum.
Looking ahead, thumbing through all the college football magazines, it's hard to miss the conclusion they've come to.
John David Booty will be going home Jan. 7 for the national title game — to New Orleans, where in his final two seasons in high school, his Evangel Christian team won state football titles.
"John David's always played well there," said his father, Johnny, his son's quarterback coach in high school, as he recalled the Evangel Christian juggernaut winning big in front of 40,000-plus crowds in the Superdome.
And, if the magazines are correct, he'll be going home for a BCS national title game against the team that's picked second behind USC in most of them, LSU.
"If the magazines are correct, it'd be us and LSU," John David said, talking about something so speculative he knows it doesn't really violate coach Pete Carroll's rule to focus only on the "next practice, the next play, the next opponent" and never really look ahead. "That'd be great."
His first thought is how "it would be a chance to get back with friends from high school, some I played with," such as LSU fullback Jacob Hester.
"There's nothing like Saturday night in Death Valley," John David Booty has said of all the games he's gone to in Baton Rouge.
The return to Louisiana would take John David Booty back to where his father followed Joe Ferguson and Terry Bradshaw as quarterback at Shreveport's Woodlawn High School in the northwest corner of the state that also bred the likes of NFL greats Bert Jones and Doug Williams.
And back to where John David Booty, the preseason national prep player of the year, became the first player to skip his senior season to enroll a year early at a Division I school. It happened right after his father was fired as quarterbacks coach at Evangel Christian.
"It wasn't planned," John David Booty said of his early exit from Louisiana. "It just seemed like the right thing to do."
And back to where USC freshman Joe McKnight, of New Orleans, briefly attended Evangel Christian after being displaced by Hurricane Katrina two years ago. Joe McKnight was the second national high school player of the year from Louisiana in five years to make the choice to head to LA for college.
LSU fans, in a video that has become a YouTube classic, were not pleased in February as they sat in by the thousands in Baton Rouge on signing day to watch Joe McKnight make his college pick. When the back whose elusive big-play ability has been compared to that of Reggie Bush put on the cardinal and gold cap instead of the purple and gold, the disbelief, then disgust, of the LSU fans was palpable on the video.
It's the capper on a bitter non-rivalry that's been brewing since the split national title in 2003. The teams that have played just twice in their history, with each winning on the road — USC in 1979, LSU in 1984.
When No. 1-ranked USC was knocked out mathematically from the BCS title game won by LSU in 2003 but then won the AP title, it earned the Trojans the undying enmity of a rabid LSU fan base that raised money to put up a billboard in Los Angeles mocking what Tigers fans reckoned was a bogus USC "Three-peat" run two years ago.
"It would be unbelievable," John David Booty said of the buildup to a possible matchup in the title game. "Like nothing we've ever seen there. LSU draws 93,000 fans a game, just like USC. And then you're in a building that holds just 70,000. There just wouldn't be anywhere near enough tickets."
A national title game against LSU would be unlike the experience USC has had in recent excursions into the SEC against Auburn and Arkansas. Those were for the most part friendly and respectable.
Based on recent events, LSU likely would be different.
The words of LSU coach Les Miles to a booster group last week posted on the Web site of radio station WWL make that clear.
Asked about the possibility of meeting USC in the BCS title game, Miles launched an anti-USC, anti-Pac-10 assault.
"I can tell you that I would like nothing better than to play USC for the title," said Miles. "I can tell you this, that they have a much easier road to travel."
Sarcastically, Miles continued his knock on the USC schedule: "They're going to play real knockdown dragouts with UCLA and Washington, Cal-Berkeley, Stanford — some real juggernauts — and they're going to end up, it would be my guess, in some position so if they win a game or two, that they'll end up in the title game. I would like that path for us. I think the SEC provides much stiffer competition."
It's an age-old debate that USC fans think should have tilted their way. In the Trojans' recent four-game foray against top-tier SEC teams Arkansas and Auburn, USC won all four.
There's also this. In a mathematical formula used over the years to calculate teams' strength of schedule, Phil Steele, editor of his own national college football magazine, doesn't agree with Miles, who speculated that if college football goes to an eight-team playoff, "four of the teams would have to be from the SEC."
According to Steele, whose magazine this season has USC and LSU 1-2, as do The Sporting News and Lindy's, Miles' schedule-strength putdown of West Coast teams is mistaken.
Last season, according to Steele's formula, USC played the second-toughest schedule in the nation and Pac-10 teams played nine of the top 10 toughest schedules.
LSU? The Tigers played the 50th-toughest schedule, Steele said.
Not much has changed for this season. USC, with road games at Nebraska and Notre Dame, and a nine-game round-robin Pac-10 schedule that gave the Trojans their only two losses a year ago, is No. 2 again in toughest schedules, according to Steele's formula. Pac-10 teams play the nation's eight toughest schedules. Only one SEC team, Tennessee, is in his top 20 (at No. 18). The Volunteers open against Cal.
LSU, with games against Middle Tennessee, Tulane and Louisiana Tech and no road game against a top-20 team, is No. 52.
But Miles wasn't backing down, continuing his theme later in the week with reporters in Baton Rouge.
"Should something be done about 'SC?" he said, repeating a question about how easy he felt it was for USC to get to New Orleans this year.
"Yeah," Miles said, then added: "It just might have to be the system first, though."
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