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Another day, another ex-trOJan trying to emulate usc hero O.J. Simpson.
This time it's Matt Leinart, who's trying to make a buck off of a disaster which he helped perpetrate. A few years back, the trojans blew a huge 4th quarter lead against Texas in the BCS Title Game, allowing the Longhorns to emerge from the Rose Bowl as the National Champions. It's one of the low-points of sc Football History, and a game that every single trojan fan would prefer to forget. So along comes Leinart, forcibly reminding them of the infamous heartbreaker, over and over and over.
The campaign is for EA Sports' "NCAA Football '08" video game, the latest in the best series in the history of Sports video games. And the concept of the campaign is great, if not original. Remember those ads last year that showed classic Sporting events, but with altered endings? The best one had Michael Jordan MISSING one of his classic buzzer-beaters. Well, this EA Sports campaign features players from teams that lost classic battles, replaying them in NCAA '08, in order to change the outcome in their teams' favor. Besides Leinart, Adrian Peterson of Oklahoma also has an ad, lamenting the wild, wild Bowl Loss to Boise State. Maybe when John David Booty graduates, he can do one about his gut-wrenching choke against UCLA -- where Booty's tipped Interception cost sc a shot at the National Title in the 13-9 shocker -- on the exact same field in Pasadena where Leinart's Texas Tear-jerker also occurred.
May that jinx live on and on.
But back to the video game ads. Don't get us wrong: It is a GREAT THING, for fans to get to go back and replay their teams' old painful losses and turn them into wins, and therefore, it's a clever ad campaign. But if a Bruin hawked a product by endlessly reminiscing about a loss to sc, we'd never forgive him, and we'd probably change the channel every time it came on. You might say that he's just being a good sport, or with Leinart, a good loser, but when MONEY is being made, it's all about GREED, not good sportsmanship. And there's nothing sporting about rubbing the faces of your own fans into the second-worst moment of their lives. Sure it's fun, challenging, and extremely satisfying to turn the tables on the hated foe who vanquished your boys on the actual field when you've got them on your video game monitor, but the fact remains that your illustrious video game Revenge will only slightly lessen the sting of the real-life loss, and nothing will ever completely erase it, so as far as we're concerned, we'd rather not see it brought up on TV every night.
Hopefully, trojan fans feel the same way, and are re-living the torture of that defeat with every single airing of Matt's lucrative commercial... just like every time they hear the magical utterance: "13-to-9."
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Click here for three brand new Fan Feedback letters, including NCAA-usc reactions
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