The Dominant 1972 USC Trojans: A Look Back, 40 Years Later
LOS ANGELES–Time is so elusive. “It feels like a hundred years ago, and it feels like two weeks ago,” said J.K. McKay.
It actually has been 40 years already. McKay was a sophomore wide receiver for the undefeated 1972 Southern California Trojan football team. McKay’s father, John, was the head coach, and his best friend, Pat Haden, was the second-string quarterback.
The ‘72 team is widely regarded as one of the best in college football history, thanks to the team’s excellence on both sides of the ball. It featured 13-All Americans; 33 eventually played in the NFL.
Neither McKay nor Haden would definitively say if the ’72 Trojans were the best collegiate team ever.
Were they?
“It’s so hard to compare different eras,” said McKay. “I think you can only compare a team to who they played against that year and that time, anyway, and we were really good.”
Similarly, Haden said, “Of that era, it was certainly one of USC’s best teams. We couldn’t compete with the guys today, of course. It was just different 40 years ago, a different era.”
McKay now serves as USC’s associate athletic director, directly under Haden, with whom he has remained best friends.
Both McKay and Haden cited the team’s dominance despite its challenging strength of schedule. By season’s end, the Trojans would take on six ranked opponents – No. 4 Arkansas, No. 15 Stanford, No. 18 Washington, No. 14 UCLA, No. 10 Notre Dame and No. 3 Ohio State.
USC defeated those six by an average of 20.2 points per game.
“In USC’s annals, it has to go down as one of our best teams,” said Haden. “We measured, because we played some pretty good teams, within our conference (and) outside of your conference, including in those days a very good Notre Dame team.”
Allan Graf, who was the senior starting center for the team, remembered the atmosphere for USC’s road opener against Arkansas: “Joe Ferguson was their quarterback and it was real loud. We could barely hear ourselves in the first quarter. After we went ahead, you could hear a pin drop.”
Despite the fact that half of the Trojans’ 12 opponents were ranked No. 18 or higher, USC was never really challenged all season. The closest game was a nine-point win over Stanford, but Stanford scored a meaningless touchdown with a minute left in the game.
“We did not have a game all year that was in doubt in the second half,” said McKay.
Although the roster was clearly very talented, there was much uncertainty before it all began about how the team would gel.
“The two years before, my dad had two of his worst seasons,” said McKay. In each of those seasons, the Trojans finished 6-4-1; by coach McKay’s standards, those were disappointing years.
McKay and Haden were both sophomores in 1972. They had not been eligible in ’71; freshmen were not yet allowed to play. Ironically, ’72 was the first year the NCAA allowed freshmen to compete.
“We had a really good (’71) freshman class with a whole bunch of really good players,” said McKay. “And they had a bunch of good players, but they just hadn’t played great yet.”
“It was sort of the meshing of the freshman coming up becoming sophomores, and the juniors and seniors that had been there that just hadn’t had a lot of success.
“It was just sort of a perfect blend, I think.”
The offense was a juggernaut, featuring future NFL Hall of Fame wide receiver Lynn Swann and other future pros such as Sam Cunningham, Charle Young, Mike Rae, Haden and McKay, among others. Anthony Davis, however, stole the show.
Davis began the season as a third-string tailback and didn’t start until the eighth game, yet he was able to amass 1,191 rushing yards and 17 touchdowns.
The Notre Dame game made him an instant USC legend. Davis scored six touchdowns, a single-game school record – running for four and scoring two more on kickoff returns.
“Anthony Davis scored a lot of touchdowns, and I had a couple of key blocks in front of the Coliseum crowd,” Graf said of the game. “That was a big thrill for me to have that.”
With USC averaging 38.9 points per game, people often forget about the ’72 team’s crushing defense.
“Everybody thinks about maybe Anthony Davis so much or Sam Cunningham, but the defense was sensational,” said Haden.
That defense held half of their 12 opponents to seven points or fewer.
“Nobody scored on them,” said McKay. “And it was unique in that my dad was one of the first to realize that he wanted to have linebackers that could really run and we had a guy named Richard ‘Batman’ Wood, who was just so fast.”
Wood, who went on to play in the NFL for 10 seasons, was reunited with his college coach when McKay and Wood joined the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 1976.
Ironically, coach McKay’s very first championship team was the ’62 Trojans. His ’67 and ’74 USC teams also won the national championship, but his third championship came 10 years after his first. That was this ’72 team.
Forty years later, USC named its new $70-million, 111,000-square-foot athletic facility after the legendary coach, who passed away in 2001.
“I said at the dedication that my dad would rather have this building named after him than the Empire State Building and he really would,” said J.K McKay. “He loved USC, and it felt when they unveiled the statue like we were bringing my dad home.”
Although his father was already an established head coach at a university with such a storied football program, initially, McKay wasn’t convinced that he should play for his dad at USC.
“He never coached me before,” said McKay, “and one of the reasons I thought about not coming to SC was that it would be weird.”
“I had a lot of success here, so I don’t think it was ever a real problem, but it’s not ideal.
“I would advise a lot of coaches’ kids, ‘Don’t do it.’”
“I always feel like my dad treated me just like he treated all of the players…like dirt,” McKay said half-jokingly. “That’s not really true, but sort of. He was tough on me, but he was tough on everybody. That was who he was.”
McKay not only played for his dad, but alongside his best friend. Haden and McKay met at the beginning of high school, and their friendship hasn’t skipped a beat ever since. On Sunday, they sat next to each other, as they watched the Trojan women’s basketball team defeat Pepperdine.
“We work together now here at SC, so I see him every day,” said Haden. Their offices are across the hall from each other in Heritage Hall.
“We’ll always be best friends,” said Haden. “We don’t really talk about football so much anymore or at all.”
The ‘72 team even had an unofficial mascot. “Pete Adams (the starting left tackle) found this stray dog, and the whole year it would come to practice and come to meetings,” said Haden. “No one else would have gotten away with that, but coach McKay loved offensive linemen and loved Pete Adams.”
The LA Times referred to the dog as “Turf,” but he was called “Turd.” “He would run wind sprints with us,” said Haden. “The dog just followed us around. Kind of unusual, but he did.”
“He became sort of our lucky charm kind of a thing,” said McKay.
Whether or not the team needed the dog’s luck, it had to face Woody Hayes’ 9-1 Ohio State Buckeyes in the Rose Bowl. Before a record crowd of 106,869 (the record still stands today), the Trojans soundly defeated the Buckeyes 42-17.
At halftime, the score was tied 7-7.
According to Graf, coach McKay had changed the team’s blocking schemes two weeks before the game, because he feared Ohio State would know what to expect.
“We go back in the locker room,” Graf said, “and he (coach McKay) goes, ‘What’s going on?’ And I said, ‘Well, let’s go back to our old blocking ways and let’s get after it.’” The Trojans went on to outscore the Buckeyes by 25 in the second half.
One final dominating effort.
Originally published by Neon Tommy.