COLUMN: USC outplayed for the first time

We saw flashes of brilliance from USC last Saturday. Adoree’ Jackson’s long touchdown catch, Jalen Greene’s first touchdown, Juju    Smith–Schuster’s creative lateral to Jackson on a kickoff return. It was a taste of all the talent USC has on its roster, of all the potential USC has to blow teams out of the water.

But we also saw a lot of instances where the Trojans were, quite frankly, outmatched. This year’s Trojan squad is a great team, but Notre Dame showed that it too was a very talented group. At the end of the day, it wasn’t the distractions from a crazy week, or the incompetency of the coaching staff, that was the difference between victory and defeat for the Trojans. For the first time all season, with all due respect to Stanford and Washington, it really looked like USC was beaten by a more talented team.

It’s hard to calculate what impact the off-the-field distractions and coaching change had on the game. But it wouldn’t have been that surprising if USC had lost 41-31 to Notre Dame if Steve Sarkisian was still the head coach and there wasn’t a recurrence of his personal issues in the middle of the season.

The reaction certainly would have been different. Instead of praising the players for overcoming adversity and giving their best effort in a tough situation, we’d be calling it another bad loss under the disappointing Sark era.

Of course, we shouldn’t hold Clay Helton to same standard after one week of preparation. When Ed Orgeron had his first game as an interim head coach two years ago, he at least had a sort of bye week. Orgeron’s first game wasn’t until the Thursday night the week after he took over. When Helton took over for Oregeron as interim head coach the first time, Helton had the usual bowl game preparation time to set up a game plan. When Helton was named the interim head coach for the second time on Sunday, Oct. 11, he only had six days before his first game.

But the problem against Notre Dame wasn’t the game plan. The Trojans brought a balanced attack of passing and running, plus a pair of trick plays. The problem was not stopping the Fighting Irish.

As previously discussed in this space, there’s been a lot of criticism of defensive coordinator Justin Wilcox, especially given the relatively poor results of the defense in two of the team’s three losses. The criticism is usually that Wilcox is too conservative, doesn’t blitz enough and plays too much zone coverage.

But if I had any criticism of the scheme from Saturday, it would be for not doing those things enough. The problem wasn’t that Notre Dame had too much time to build drives; the problem was USC got beat over the top on a bunch of big plays.

Jackson’s touchdown catch and run was fantastic, and really changed the dynamic of the game. But defensively, the touchdown pass he let up to Will Fuller basically negated that. It was a play where the Trojans were in man-to-man defense, there wasn’t help over the top from the safeties and Jackson just got beat. For someone as athletic as Jackson to just get outplayed like that shows how athletic Fuller is.

That was only the second time Jackson was burned by Fuller. During the Irish’s game-tying drive, Jackson needed to commit a pass interference penalty to stop Fuller from another touchdown catch, but that drive — which featured another major pass interference on a long ball — ultimately did end in seven points. Throw in another big 45-yard pass to Fuller in single coverage to set up the Irish’s last field goal, plus USC getting burned on a double pass during a touchdown drive — which maybe the Trojans should have seen coming, but the Irish must have practiced one all week and their defense still bit on USC’s —and that’s 24 points the defense could have prevented with more conservative coverage.

Irish quarterback DeShone Kizer was sacked four times but also showed a fair amount of mobility and certainly wasn’t picking apart USC’s zone coverage. Bringing more pressure would have just made the Trojans more vulnerable to big plays.

Offensively, it’s easy to look at the end of the game and say USC didn’t have enough of a sense of urgency. And granted, on the final drive of the game, Cody Kessler probably did go to his check-downs too many times instead of airing it out. But the real problem was the two interceptions he had earlier in the game. One of them was a deflected ball in relatively tight coverage; one of them was a spectacular play by an Irish defensive back. All in all, credit to the Irish secondary for causing the turnovers rather than blame Kessler for not showing up in the big game when it mattered most. If Kessler really pushed it more on the final drive, the Trojans would have had a marginally better chance of coming back, but he was more likely to have just ended up with a third interception.

With all that being said, USC can still win the Pac-12 South. There’s no doubt in my mind that USC can upset Utah this weekend. No. 3 still seems awfully high for Utah given the lack of attention it had going into the season, but the Utes have earned their way to first place in the South division standings. If USC can win that game and see Utah lose one more time in conference, the Trojans then control their destiny to the conference title game, as hard as that is to believe.

Regardless of the game plan, the playcalling, or who is deciding those two, the Trojans will face teams that are on par or better than them talent wise. Even for a school as proud as USC, that will be true against teams like Notre Dame with comparable tradition and teams like Utah without it. That’s just the landscape of college football. So each loss doesn’t need to be a crushing blow to our reputation or recruiting abilities. And despite all the drama, the Trojans still have the chance to make their mark in the conference race.