Feb. 8, 2026, 5:29 a.m. PT

USC football has produced many Rose Bowl winners and legends. Of those Rose Bowl champions who have come through Troy, another more select group has then won a Super Bowl. Keyshawn Johnson, who won the 1996 Rose Bowl for USC against Northwestern, then added a Super Bowl to his trophy collection when the Tampa Bay Buccaneers beat the Oakland Raiders in Super Bowl XXXVII.

That Super Bowl was played this century — 2003 — but it belongs to a very different era of NFL history. The New England Patriots’ win in Super Bowl XXXVI the year before against the St. Louis Rams didn’t feel like the launching point of a dynasty, given that the Pats didn’t return to the Super Bowl the following season. The Raider team the Buccaneers defeated in the Super Bowl was knocking on the door for years and finally won an AFC championship, the franchise’s first since the 1983 season. No one could have predicted back then that the Raiders — a gold-standard NFL franchise at the time — would become very bad and very irrelevant over the next two decades of pro football.

When Jon Gruden, the Buccaneers’ coach, won this Super Bowl, he was only 39 years old. It seemed he would be a great NFL head coach for a very long time. Instead, his career flamed out.

This was the first Super Bowl called by the announcing tandem of Al Michaels and John Madden. They would work two more Super Bowls in subsequent years, the latter of which was on NBC. This game and Super Bowl XL in 2006 were on ABC.

The game was played in the old Jack Murphy Stadium — later called Qualcomm Stadium — in San Diego, a structure which no longer exists. Neither do the San Diego Chargers, having relocated to Los Angeles.

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This game contained so many fascinating details from a point in time when the NFL, on and off the field, was in transition from an era of old-guard quarterbacks — the Raiders’ Rich Gannon, the Broncos’ John Elway, the Dolphins’ Dan Marino, the 49ers’ Steve Young, the Cowboys’ Troy Aikman — to the new generation of quarterbacks which would dominate the 21st century: Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, Ben Roethlisberger, Drew Brees, Philip Rivers, and others.

In the midst of these transitions, Keyshawn Johnson and the Buccaneers both won a first Super Bowl. The Bucs had reached the NFC Championship Game in the 1979 season but got shut out by the Los Angeles Rams at home. Over two decades later, the Bucs were able to finally make the Super Bowl and then deliver, with Keyshawn lending a helping hand.

For a great USC Trojan and a long-starved NFL franchise, the long wait for a Super Bowl was entirely worth it.