There was no From Both Sidelines last week, mostly because there wasn’t really another sideline from which to build it. Portland State coach Chris Fisk doesn’t have the same sort of weekly press conference availability we normally use for this feature, at least not one we could find, and forcing the format simply for the sake of maintaining the calendar didn’t make much sense. This week is different in just about every way.
Big Ten play begins Saturday in the Coliseum, Oregon walks into Los Angeles with a loss already attached to its season and USC arrives undefeated after surviving a very different kind of test at Rutgers. These are two programs that know one another, two coaching staffs with plenty of familiarity and two teams that played a consequential game against each other less than a year ago. Listening to Dan Lanning and Lincoln Riley on Monday, that familiarity was obvious, but so were the areas where each coach believes this game will be decided.
