The holiday weekend traffic on I-5 had slowed to a crawl, the thrush of cars inching toward SeaTac airport moving at a painfully slow pace. Jennifer Cohen was already beyond antsy. She hadn’t seen her youngest son, Dylan, since before she became USC’s newest athletic director. Their last visit was in early August, almost four months earlier, when Cohen found herself balancing Washington’s impending move to the Big Ten with moving Dylan into his Montana dorm room.
But Montana, where Dylan is a freshman offensive lineman, had a first-round bye in the FCS playoffs last week, while USC had an unusually late bye off baked into its football schedule.