SAN FRANCISCO — It was a football game that featured an opening tipoff that came 90 minutes before the opening kickoff.

That’s when Joe McKnight appeared on the field Saturday for warmups wearing sweat pants instead of game pants, a hoodie rather than a helmet.
Dressed not as a college athlete but as a college student, an undeniable sign USC isn’t comfortable yet with its findings from an internal investigation into McKnight’s use of someone else’s SUV.
He came up here Wednesday, joining his teammates on their Emerald Bowl trip two days tardy, thinking he would play. “I guess that was the plan,” McKnight said afterward.
He was told Christmas night he instead would remain benched. “Very difficult,” McKnight said. “There just wasn’t enough time I guess.”
So now the school displays some institutional control.
That development was as obvious as McKnight was anonymous in USC’s 24-13 victory over Boston College. But what has been happening at USC the past few years — from Reggie Bush to O.J. Mayo to now McKnight — remains fuzzy.
Who knew what and when and what they should have known to begin with is the common thread weaving through an athletic department that continues to have its very fabric questioned.
And questions are all over this football program today. From why didn’t Carroll or one of his assistants better monitor McKnight’s behavior to what is team MVP Damian Williams’ future to what happened to USC’s aura, never mind its era?
Most important of all, what do all these question marks mean to a team used to ending seasons on exclamation points?
“I think we got some of it back tonight,” freshman linebacker Chris Galippo said. “This was a big step — learning to win a big game, on the road, a bowl game. We took our lumps as a unit, that’s for sure. Hey, we had a lot of lessons to learn.”
The season is over, but the open season is not. The issues at USC will remain fodder in spaces like this one and in places like recruits’ living rooms, where rival coaches can openly predict future NCAA intervention in Troy.
One thing certain late Saturday night was that McKnight, despite the current clouds, plans on remaining a Trojan rather than entering the NFL draft.
“I’m coming back,” he said. “That could change, maybe, but that’s not where my mind is right now. I have my mind set on coming back for my senior year.”
McKnight wasn’t with his team when the Trojans arrived in the Bay Area on Monday, instead showing up two days later as the school’s probe continued. Turns out he made it to San Francisco but left his immediate eligibility in L.A.
Carroll explained that USC officials didn’t have ample time to convincingly clear McKnight, who declined to discuss specifics of his situation.
“Right now, this is a very critical time for our university and our compliance department,” Carroll said, sounding more like a provost than a coach. “(It is important for us) to figure this kind of stuff out.”
Important? It’s much more than that at USC, where football remains the school’s identity, its face seen nationally through the bars of a helmet and mask.
Yeah, USC is significantly more than Saturday afternoons; we all understand that. But we’re not sure anyone in Lincoln or Columbus or Austin does. And we’re certain those folks don’t really care.
Three Trojans regulars missed this game because of academic issues. While Carroll and his staff aren’t specifically at fault — “We can’t do the work for them,” Carroll said — the absences only added to what wasn’t here for USC.
“It’s been a tough time for a lot of us,” McKnight said. “But that’s part of being involved in a program like this one. You have to deal with a lot of outside things.”
So this is where USC football was Saturday: playing in a lower-tier bowl after seven years of BCS brilliance, in a football game that featured foul poles; emerging from the dugout of the San Francisco Giants; and talking about dealing with being a Trojan.
“When you’re young, you have to go through lessons,” Galippo said. “We came out strong and people started to talk about us, comparing us to this team or that team, saying we could do all this stuff. But we had a lot to learn first.”
So going forward, we know USC has a still young but now experienced quarterback, a secondary full of available playing time and an aura that has been as battered as the seven-year era built by Carroll.
But there’s a lot more we don’t know and some things we’ll probably never know.
An up-and-down season is over. An up-and-down offseason could be next.