We don’t generally traffic in volleyball highlights around here, but there’s a first time for everything. This is that time. Last night, Illinois beat USC in five sets to make its first NCAA women’s volleyball championship match ever. And the Illini advanced in style.

USC destroyed UCLA 50-0 last night, and if that’s not enough to convince you that the swagger of the heights of the Pete Carroll era is returning to the L.A. Coliseum, maybe the video after the jump will.

Never let anyone tell you that perfection is impossible. Fleeting? Yes. Unsustainable? Sure. Striving for perfection in one’s everyday life is a recipe for trouble. But certain things, certain small moments – those can produce perfection, and as long as you accept it as an isolated instance, such moments can be something to behold.

Fox Sports’ Bob Oschack hit USC’s campus recently with a simple mission: get USC students to welcome the school’s newest conference rivals, Colorado and Utah, to the Pac-12. But he wasn’t going to get just any students to do it – he was going to get students who might not be big sports fans (and therefore nerds), and therefore be uncomfortable with the Pac-12 greeting. But these couldn’t be just any hilarious nerds Oschack would make squirm: no, specifically, he’d be targeting Asian nerds. That way, we’re able to laugh at the kids for being uncomfortable, and their hilarious accents!

It was, in many ways, an offseason to forget in college football. The Jim Tressel mess. The ongoing North Carolina mess that led to coach Butch Davis losing his job. And the Miami saga. Oh, that Miami saga. And yet the season kicks off tonight…and we’re excited. Really excited. How, when the game and its governing body have such deep, systemic flaws – and when there’s a professional league that plays a higher level of football – do we work up such excitement? Well, anecdotes like one we heard today from the Los Angeles Times‘ Gary Klein go a long way toward an explanation.

Apparently it’s a tradition for the USC marching band to head off to Lake Tahoe ever year. Such retreats, to my limited knowledge of how a collegiate marching band operates, are standard procedure. For the last couple years, though, a funny thing keeps happening during these retreats: the USC Song Girls keep appearing, in full uniform. More of what we mean after the jump.

USC and Arizona will face off tonight, but USC coach Kevin O’Neill allegedly started the competition early when he and his wife got into a fight with a fan.

Stanford quarterback Andrew Luck is having an outstanding season, and his best play of the year so far might have come on Saturday against USC – and it came on a Stanford fumble.