Daily Evergreen (WSU Student Paper): Lifestyles of Leinart

USC player continues to lead team to victory, bring in awards for offensive play.

KYLE BONAGURA

For Matt Leinart, winning the Pac-10 Offensive Player of the Week award probably doesn’t qualify as one of the top-100 accomplishments in his career. After all, the guy has won the Heisman Trophy, two national titles, is a two-time All-American and has been romantically linked to Alyssa Milano and Kristin from MTV’s Laguna Beach.  Last week, Leinart threw four touchdown passes in a route of Stanford which earned Leinart his first Pac-10 Offensive Player of the Week award this year.  The only blemish on Leinart’s near-perfect resume is a triple overtime loss to Cal in 2002 which kept USC out of the Bowl Championship Series title game. Since that game, the Trojans have rattled off 31 straight wins and are well on their way to their third straight national title.  USC got some revenge last year with a win against Cal in L.A., but on Saturday the Trojans will return to Berkeley, where the triple O.T. loss was played.  However, this trip to Berkeley will be against a much different team, according to Cal head coach Jeff Tedford.  “We had veteran teams at that time,” he said. “Now we have a lot of young guys and this will be their first experience with a team like USC.”  As good as the Trojans were in 2002 – a team that was crowned the Associated Press national champions – offensively this team is light years ahead of where it was when Cal beat it.  USC ranks No. 1 in the nation in offense, with a 593.6 average and is putting up 49.9 points per game. Both figures could be much higher if USC didn’t call off the dogs in blowout wins against Hawaii (63-7), Arkansas (70-17), Washington (51-24), WSU (55-13) and Stanford (51-21).  The offensive success even boggles USC head coach Pete Carroll’s mind.  “Yeah, that’s pretty extraordinary,” Carroll said. “That’s a lot of points every week.”  National critics have pointed to porous defenses in the Pac-10 which has allowed USC to rack up incredible offensive numbers, but Carroll disagrees wholeheartedly.  “It’s not the defenses that are bad, it’s the offenses that are so good in the [Pac-10],” he said.