This is definitely not your grandfather’s USC. The old Tailback U has given way the Tailback Shuffle. Back in the John McKay and John Robinson glory days, the Trojans used to grind out Heisman Trophy tailbacks faster than McDonald’s grinds out greasy burgers. Every time you looked up, there was Marcus Allen or O.J. Simpson or Charles White carrying the ball 40 times for 200 yards and vaulting into the end zone more often than all those blonde USC song girls were vaulting into the air. McKay and Robinson turned the position into the most glamorous in college football.

Every high school blue-chip running back in America was thinking the same thing back then: I’ll go to USC, gain gobs of yards and score four touchdowns every week, watch that beautiful white horse of a mascot parade around the Coliseum and, come December, I’ll make my way to New York to pick up my Heisman.

Then the trophy-filled days of the late ’60s and early ’70s faded into a sea of Pac-10 mediocrity. Trojan boosters suffered through some lean times until Pete Carroll arrived in 2001, bringing an immediate energy boost of an attitude and a brand new playbook along with him.

Next thing you knew, USC was winning bowl games and national championships again — only the stars weren’t tailbacks. They were quarterbacks. Carson Palmer and Matt Leinart both took home Heismans, and things were going so well that a gifted, all-around athlete named Matt Cassel, who sometimes looked better than both of them in practice, couldn’t even make it onto the field during games.

So what about the tailbacks? Well, there were a couple of pretty good ones named Reggie Bush and LenDale White, either of whom could have gained 2,000 yards in a season as the feature back. Even then, Carroll preferred to alternate both in what came to be known as the “Thunder and Lightning” combination, with power-running White providing the thunder and the electric Bush creating the lightning. White finished as the school’s career leader in touchdowns with 57, and Bush, maybe the most exciting of all the fabled tailbacks in Trojan history, won the Heisman as a junior in 2005.

In the three years since Bush and White sprinted off to the NFL, however, the tailback position at USC has undergone an identity shift. It’s not that the talent level has dropped, mind you. If anything, there’s a talent glut. Carroll, the master recruiter, signs so many blue-chip tailbacks these days, he doesn’t know what to do with all of them. Other than, well, use all of them.

After every play, dazzlingly gifted runners shuffle on and off the field in a cardinal-and-gold blur. You sit at USC games these days and say, “Ooooh, great run.” Then you pause for a few seconds before you add, “OK, which one was it this time?”

In 2007, there were no fewer than 10 tailbacks listed on the roster, most of whom were considered among the finest high school runners in the country before they arrived. In 2008, the list was shaved to only seven tailbacks (including a redshirt freshman), and this season, Carroll has managed to whittle it all the way down to six. Imagine how other teams in the Pac-10 feel. A year ago, new UCLA coach Rick Neuheisel couldn’t find one quality tailback to send out there, and across town Carroll had guys listed sixth or seventh on his depth chart who could have started in Westwood.

It isn’t that USC’s running game has suffered through all this. It’s just that it has been … different. Instead of the old 1,800-yard feature back, there is senior Stafon Johnson, who gained 705 yards a year ago, along with junior Joe ­McKnight, who ran for 659 yards, and junior C.J. Gable, who slithered his way for 617. In all, the Trojans’ top five ball-carriers rushed for 2,347 yards and 23 touchdowns and averaged just shy of six yards per carry.

The problem is, the running game was rarely the consistent force USC fans and alumni remember from the old days. Under Carroll, it is more like a complementary piece to the passing game, rather than the other way around. Since Bush and White left, the running game has appeared smooth and fluid only on occasion — a result, critics say, of the constant shuffling of tailbacks. The offensive line must adjust its timing and blocking angles differently for each back, and when a new one comes in on every play, that can be difficult to pull off.

As for the tailbacks themselves, they’ll tell you they’d like the ball more. Each one came to USC harboring Heisman dreams, and each now gets frustrated at times. In the past three years, two highly touted out-of-state prospects, Emmanuel Moody and Broderick Green, became so discouraged, they transferred.

“Yeah, you’ve got to get used to it,” says Gable, the most well-rounded of the tailback candidates. “It’s hard, though. We get mad. If you don’t get mad, you’re not human. But it’s all about how you deal with it. We know we could have gone to any school and been the main guy. But we came here to be part of a winning team. It makes it worth it when you win Pac-10 titles and go to the Rose Bowl all the time. We all contribute. Everybody puts in his part. It’s hard, but that is how Coach Carroll teaches us.”

Johnson, maybe the best pure runner of the bunch, says it’s all about adjusting mentally.

“Of course, everybody wants to be out there to get into the flow,” he says. “But this team has so many great football players. People who don’t know always say, ‘You should be angry. You should be playing more.’ But I’m okay with it. I’ve got no problem with it. Do I hope we run more this year? Put it this way: I wouldn’t mind.”

There is little margin for error. You make a mistake at tailback, and you’re out of there. Gable fumbled early against UCLA last season and never got another chance the rest of the game. It can work the other way, too, though. Johnson had a spectacular all-around game at Arizona, busting a big punt return, making a key block on a touchdown pass and taking the brunt of the carries on the only long TD march of the night. The next week, against Washington, Gable started ahead of him.

“We don’t really have a starter at the position,” says Carroll. “We don’t think of it that way. They’re all starters.” At least that’s how it worked the past few seasons with pass-happy Steve Sarkisian, a former quarterback, as Carroll’s offensive coordinator. Now Sarkisian has left to become the coach at Washington, and the new quarterbacks coach (and play-caller) is 32-year-old Jeremy Bates, who spent last season as the offensive coordinator in Denver with Jay Cutler. Besides simplifying some of the play calls this spring, Bates says that he ­wouldn’t mind “pounding the ball” more than the Trojans have the past few seasons.

In the meantime, the two tailbacks who carried the ball the most in spring practice were sophomore Marc Tyler, who showed brief flashes of brilliance a year ago, and stubby redshirt freshman Curtis McNeal. Neither figures to be in the main rotation come fall. That list includes Johnson, Gable and the injury-prone McKnight, an exciting breakaway threat who seems to be a personal Carroll favorite, along with junior Allen Bradford, who has been the best practice runner of the bunch.

Don’t worry — you’ll probably see all of them at some point. Just circle the date Sept. 5. That’s when the shuffling of USC tailbacks officially resumes.

This feature appears in the 2009 Athlon Sports Pac-10 magazine. Click here to purchase your copy.

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