USC again shows it's at its best at the season's end

	Dwayne Jarrett (8) and John David Booty hooked up for 132 yards and three TDs as the Trojans won their 33rd straight at home. Stephen Dunn/Getty Images
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LOS ANGELES -- It's become a biennial Thanksgiving weekend tradition in Los Angeles. First, the locals carve their turkeys, then they gather at the Coliseum to watch their Trojans carve up Notre Dame.

No. 3 USC's 44-24 victory here Saturday night over the sixth-ranked Irish must have caused some serious déjà vu for those who watched it. There was No. 10 in cardinal and gold picking apart the Irish secondary much like No. 11 two years ago and No. 3 two years before that. There were those athletic Trojans defenders breaking up passes and knocking down ball carriers just like their 2002 and '04 predecessors.

And there was USC tacking on a fluky, last-minute touchdown to surpass the 40-point mark against the Irish for a third straight time at the Coliseum.

"It was a fun night of football," Trojans coach Pete Carroll said afterward. "For the most part, we felt like we were in command throughout."

We'd have to check the archives to be certain, but it's possible Carroll uttered the same statement after his team's last two home games against their blue-and-gold rivals. This one, however, wasn't supposed to be as easy.

After all, these were not the Carson Palmer/Mike Williams or Matt Leinart/Reggie Bush Trojans that so routinely throttled their opponents; this was the John David Booty/running-back-by-committee USC team that lost to Oregon State. And these were not the inept Irish of the Tyrone Willingham era; this was the powerful new Notre Dame as crafted by Charlie Weis, the savior who was hired in large part because Willingham kept getting blown out by the Trojans.

If Notre Dame had faced USC in, say, October, back when USC was struggling to beat the likes of Washington and Washington State and losing to the Beavers, it's entirely possible the result would have been different. Unfortunately for the Irish, when this game's in L.A., it's always held in late November. And as they've proven the past five years under Carroll, the Trojans are quite literally untouchable in November.

It's hard to believe it was only a month ago that USC was staring at the brink of irrelevance, down 33-10 at Oregon State and looking like a shell of its former self. The offense wasn't clicking. The defense wasn't scaring anyone. The Trojans were the furthest thing from a national title contender.

What seemed at the time like a harmless little near-comeback -- USC scoring three unanswered touchdowns before finally falling to the Beavers 33-31 -- instead turned out to be the dawn of the Trojans' resurgence. A month later, USC has knocked off three straight ranked opponents with ease and heads into the first week of December in the thick of the national title race ... again.

"I hate to even admit this, but we learned something in that [Oct. 28] Oregon State game," said Carroll. "I don't know what it was, but we changed."

"It was a wake-up call for us," Booty said of the loss. "We're so used to winning, sometimes you need a reality check. If you go back and look at the games that were close, or the Oregon State game, they were really just a matter of us hurting ourselves. We had a lot of young guys, including myself as a first-year starter, who were still growing into their roles. We've really grown up the past few weeks and taken the next step.

"Now, we're the ones hurting the other teams."