Kneecaps, ankles and feet have gotten more than their share of  news coverage this summer at the USC and UCLA training camps, with Bruin quarterbacks Ben Olsen and Patrick Cowan sidelined indefinitely and Trojan Mark Sanchez still unsure if he can play the whole game Saturday in USC’s opener at Virginia.

Pete Carroll and Rick Neuheisel must be hearing the old tune, “the ankle bone is connected to the leg bone, the leg bone’s connected to…” Sanchez’s kneecap which got spun out of whack while he was doing jumping jacks before practice.

USC is deep enough at QB to weather an injury to its starter, but Neuheisel is forced to draw cards, with a junior college transfer as his first  pick.

Not the way he wanted to begin his tenure at Westwood, which officially starts Monday against No. 18 Tennessee at the Rose Bowl.

For Carroll, it’s almost becoming ho-hum, another very good team, another chance for a national title, with going to the Rose Bowl New Year’s Day the worst that can happen at the end of his eighth season.

USC, ranked No. 3 in nearly very preseason poll, has the kind of schedule that can get it to Title Night, meaning it’s not a cream-puff lot, the Pacific 10  never is. The Trojans’ last four losses have all been against conference opponents.

But they should be able to skip past the Cavaliers on the road. The other two non-conference tilts are at home against BCS-miserable Ohio State and just plain miserable Notre Dame. Sprinkled in are the usual conference suspects including California, Arizona State and a road game against Stanford, which embarrassed the hell out of Carroll & Co., last season, a loss  that essentially ruined USC’s chances of going to BCS Dreamland.

As for UCLA, Neuheisel won a needless, drawn-out derby to replace a fired Karl Dorrell, and he has vowed to put Bruin football back on a level closer to his Cardinal & Gold nemesis.

Ads running in L.A. newspapers this week proclaim, “The Monopoly is Over.” But if UCLA is playing that game, it will have trouble getting past “Go.”

Inexperience saturates the offense like sweat  seeping through the coach’s shirt on a muggy afternoon at Spalding Field.

Maybe its by design, but Neuheisel looks anything but like the Slick Rick sharpie, the   image he flaunted at Colorado and Washington, his previous college stop offs.

The best feature of Neuheisel’s team may be his coaching staff, led by Norm Chow, the former USC offensive wizard who created touchdown-making plays for Matt Leinart and Reggie Bush. And DeWayne Walker, who is considered one of the best defensive strategists in the college game.

Kickoff for USC-Virgnia is scheduled for 12:30 p.m., Pacific Time, on ESPN. UCLA gets a Labor Day Rocky Top prime-time slot Monday Night against the Vols, starting at 5 o’clock on the West Coast. ESPN will provide the camera angles.

John Scheibe covers West Coast football for CollegeBlitz and is the author of the book "On the Road With Jim Murray: Baseball and the Summer of '79," available from amazon.com and other retailers.