Bruins Nation readers are already no doubt aware that Southern Cal is #1 in the nation in penalties per game. Given that Troy's head coach used to coach the Oakland Raiders, this should come as no surprise. But it is notable that last week in Tucson, Arizona took an early 7-0 lead and barely won by 3 points, on a drive kept alive by a taunting penalty on USC. (I don't recall Coach Wooden ever having to tell his student-athletes not to taunt.)

But SC is also #1 in a direct character measure. The NFL survey of least-liked pro players just came out, with the Top 10 Least-Liked identified. Note that players can have attended any one of the 342 Division 1 colleges, so the odds of any school having one least-liked player is less than one-third of one percent. This explains why for the Pac-12, eleven universities did not have one. However, one conference school did have a Least-Liked player, in fact it had two of them! The character-building champion is, of course, USC. Its "select" exemplars are Matt Leinart and Mark Sanchez, both role models for the ages. It goes without saying that no other school in the country had two representatives, so Southern Cal is truly #1.

In other news, UCLA won another Nobel prize....