College Football Rewind: 5 most important games from 2004 season

4. (1) USC 31, Stanford 28

The 2004 Trojans were one of the all time great teams in college football, but they had a couple of scares along the way during the season.

Stanford was a struggling team in the Pac-10 and had been irrelevant for sometime. One of the themes that will become more evident in future episodes of the series is that USC under Pete Carroll would sleepwalk at times against opponents they should be beating by double-digits, sometimes they would avoid the upset but other times it would have disastrous effects on the season. This would be the former.

Stanford would take a 28-17 lead into halftime, but the Trojan defense would pitch a shut out in the second half and when Lendale White scored the go-ahead touchdown with nearly six minutes left, the Trojans would be ahead for good and avoid a terrible loss to the Cardinal, who would finish the year 4-7.

This game is very important for the obvious reason: if USC loses this game, they would not have made the national championship game and Carroll would have never won an outright and undisputed title, which could have given his legacy a second look.

Thankfully, the best team USC has ever produced avoided the upset and the college football world got to witness greatness. They were not done, however, playing in tense and important games this season.