USC got the name Trojans during a disastrous detour into rugby
Between 1911 and 1913, USC dropped American football for rugby and was thrashed by more experienced teams while the school's finances wobbled. A Los Angeles Times writer, admiring how the players fought on against bigger, better-equipped rivals, started calling them Trojans. The name stuck to a program that later won eleven national titles.
Before that, USC's teams were the Methodists, or the Wesleyans. Its first game, on November 14, 1888, was a 16–0 win over the Alliance Athletic Club, organised by quarterback Arthur Carroll, who also volunteered to sew the team's pants and later became a tailor. West Coast travel was so limited that for years it played mostly local colleges such as Occidental and Caltech, and its first trip beyond Southern California, to Stanford in 1905, ended in a 16–0 defeat.
National prominence came in the 1920s, and under coach Howard Jones from 1925 to 1940 the team, nicknamed the Thundering Herd, won its first four national titles. John McKay's era from 1960 to 1975 added four more championships and Heisman winners Mike Garrett and O. J. Simpson. On September 12, 1970, USC visited Bear Bryant's all-white Alabama bringing the first racially mixed squad ever to take the field there, winning 42–21 with every touchdown scored by Black players. Bryant then persuaded his university to accept Black players, speeding integration across the Deep South.
The 1980s and 1990s were leaner, including 13 years without beating Notre Dame and eight without beating crosstown UCLA. Pete Carroll, hired in 2001, revived the program: Carson Palmer became USC's first quarterback to win the Heisman, and in the 2003 season USC topped the AP poll while LSU won the BCS title, a split championship the NCAA refused to settle with an extra game.
USC counts eight Heisman winners, more than any other university, and 582 NFL draft picks, second only to Notre Dame, its fiercest rival. As of 2026 it was the only top-division school never to play a lower-division opponent since the 1978 split.
Source: USC Trojans football
