USC-Minnesota football series is improbably insignificant
USC and Minnesota are both championship-rich college football programs. That’s not hyperbole. Minnesota has six college football national championships, putting the Golden Gophers in 10th place on the all-time list. USC is tied for sixth with nine national titles. You can do the math and realize that these programs have combined for 15 national titles.
So: Where are the great, classic meetings between these two programs? It’s true that Minnesota’s 1930s and early-1940s juggernauts under coach Bernie Bierman did not play in the Rose Bowl. Bierman did not believe in playing an exhibition game, which is what he thought the Granddaddy was.
Yet, even if Minnesota did play in the Rose Bowl back then, the Gophers’ best teams and the Trojans’ best teams would not have lined up against each other. USC’s dominant teams under Howard Jones were produced in the early 1930s. Jones dominated at USC from his arrival in 1925 through the 1933 season. Then he hit a lull in 1934, and that’s precisely when Bierman’s best Minnesota teams emerged. Minnesota won five of its six national titles from 1934 through 1941, in years when USC football was not elite.
Much later, Minnesota won the national title in 1960 and USC won in 1962. One of the two teams made the Rose Bowl three straight years, from the 1960 through 1962 regular seasons, but they never met in the Granddaddy. That’s why we say this series is “improbably insignificant” heading into the Big Ten era.
USC leads the series 6-1. The last meeting came in 2011, with the Trojans winning, 19-17.
Paul Myerberg of USA TODAY Sports dove into the details of the Trojan-Gopher series:
“The Trojans have won five in a row against Minnesota after losing 25-19 on the road in 1955 and tying the Golden Gophers 20-20 at home in 1965. Both teams were ranked when they met to open the 1968 season, with the Trojans winning 29-20 in the first of three games that season against the Big Ten, along with Northwestern and Ohio State.”
