With a 24-team College Football Playoff, what are the chances a school goes independent like Notre Dame?

USC would certainly consider it because it considers anything that would make more money. It could schedule nine home games and not share its TV money with a conference. It would be even better if Ohio State and Michigan went along to form a mini-alliance, and the three teams played each other.

USC would suddenly want to play Notre Dame every year, especially with Netflix already making offers for the game. The rest of the schedule could be Lincoln Riley-cupcakes to guarantee a playoff bid.

• The Investiture Ceremony for USC president Beong-Soo Kim is this morning at 9:30 a.m. at Alumni Memorial Park. A celebration of the event for the Trojan Family will be held from 1:30-3:30 p.m. at McCarthy Quad. Among the musical guests performing are USC alumnus Aloe Blacc and Allen Stone.

• And now for some history:
• There’s been a lot of talk at USC this season about the freshmen wide receivers.

So let’s remember (because some have forgotten) the exploits of Mike Williams as a freshman. He caught 81 passes for 1,265 yards and 14 TD’s his initial season.

His best game occurred when USC went to play Oregon at Autzen Stadium. Williams caught 13 passes for 226 yards and two touchdowns against the No. 14-ranked Ducks. Those marks for receptions and yards set freshmen records at USC.

This game became famous because Oregon had put a 40-foot mural and billboard of its three wide receivers — Samie Parker, Keenan Howry and Jason Willis — on the side of the Hotel Figueroa in downtown Los Angeles. It was just two miles from USC.

Lane Kiffin, who was USC’s wide receivers coach, put a picture of the billboard in the wide receivers’ playbook.

“We took it really personal,” USC wide receiver Kareem Kelly said. “We took it personal from the day we started camp until the day we played them, which was today.

“Every time we have a home game we have to pass the billboard because it is in downtown our hotel is in downtown, and it is an insult to us.”

“It was a slap in the face. We wanted to prove to the country and the West Coast that we have some real receivers over here.”

After the game, Williams, Kelly and Keary Colbert recreated the Oregon billboard pose.

• Is John Ferraro the first USC player to make the cover of  Street & Smith’s Football Pictorial Yearbook?

The table of contents lists his full name and appears along with the photographer who made special use of a new film material called Kodachrome.

“If any tackle in this land of ours has ever played better ball, he must be Superman and Hercules rolled into one,” Braven Dyer wrote for Los Angeles Times in 1944.

• One summer day in 2007, Peyton Manning showed up at USC because he wanted to work out while shooting a commercial at the Coliseum. The workout was arranged by USC basketball coach Tim Floyd, a close friend of the Manning family.

Floyd was a ball boy for the New Orleans Saints when Archie Manning was the quarterback and attended the workout.

So for about an hour, Manning threw passes to USC players. The first thought was how much harder the passes were than anything usually being thrown by then-quarterbacks John David Booty and Mark Sanchez. The second impression was the great hands of incoming freshman tailback Joe McKnight, who never dropped a pass from the NFL superstar.

That only led to even more expectations for the tailback, who arrived with great expectations. It was unfair in retrospect but a lot of comparisons were made to recent running back Reggie Bush.

• This was quite a sports/entertainment complex in Los Angeles.

Gilmore Stadium (capacity 18,000) was built in 1934 and home to the Los Angeles Bulldogs. Jackie Robinson played for the Bulldogs in 1941. It was the site of a speech by President Truman in 1948 and a Three Stooges movie titled, “Three Little Pigskins.”

The stadium was next to Farmer’s Market, which of course, is still there. The better-known Gilmore Field baseball stadium was built in 1939 about 200 yards to the west. The Hollywood Stars baseball team played there. The Pan-Pacific Auditorium was the site of many events, including USC basketball games.

The Gilmore structures are now the site of CBS Television City and the Grove.

• Then there was Wrigley Field near USC on 42nd Street and Avalon Blvd. It was designed by Zachary Taylor Davis, the architect of Wrigley Field in Chicago and meant to look like the Cubs’ famous stadium.

One night, a woman was taking a bath in one of the houses across the street. Steve Bilko, the famous slugger for the Los Angeles Angels, hit a home run that broke through a bathroom window and landed in the bathtub. The ball was cut up from the glass. The woman was unharmed.

PICTURES OF THE WEEK

Linda Harrison

Francoise Pascal

VIDEO OF THE WEEK

Let’s continue with What’s My Line? for another week. Here’s a very young Wilt Chamberlain in 1961, who was just 24 at the time. He wasn’t even the celebrity guest of the episode. That was Joan Crawford.