Settling a Score With TV Guide

If you enjoy college football as much as I do, you may want to tune in to tonight's Oregon-Southern California game on ABC. It should be entertaining. Fourth-ranked Oregon will be looking for its third straight victory in this Pac-12 series. You wouldn't know this if you looked at the latest issue of TV Guide.

The top listing in the TV schedule for Saturday the 19th is the Oregon-USC game. TV Guide describes the two teams as Pac-10 powers. Not anymore, TV Guide. The Pac-10 became the Pac-12 when Colorado and Utah joined the conference. The magazine then states that the Trojans defeated the Ducks 44-10 last season. I knew right away I was reading a fact error.

Even a casual college football fan can tell you that Oregon made it to the championship game last season, and that would not have been possible with a 34-point loss to the Trojans. I looked up the 2010 result and, sure enough, Oregon won 53-32 at USC. Where did TV Guide get 44-10, I wondered, so I checked to see if that was the score in 2009. Nope. Oregon won that one 47-20. Turns out, the 44-10 game TV Guide referred to took place in 2008.

And the all-time series lead for USC should read 37-18-2, not 37-16-2. For whatever reason, TV Guide failed to recognize the existence of the 2009 and 2010 college football seasons. Perhaps a bitter USC fan was in charge of the TV listings. If so, I can't blame him. As a University of Florida graduate, I'd like to erase the 2010 and 2011 seasons from my memory.