I’ve been trying to say it from the very beginning but was constantly chastised for my take. But it seems that whether people like it or not, it has been proven over the past few USC football games: Redshirt junior quarterback Miller Moss was simply not good enough.

Now, I am a little biased because sports columnist Thomas Johnson and I have had a long-standing bet dating back to a few weeks after the college football season ended last year.

Of course, this was before Moss’ infamous Holiday Bowl performance, but I had said that as USC’s starter, Moss would not get the Trojans to six wins. Johnson now looks to owe me — as well as former staff writers Darren Parry and Jack Hallinan — some pizza and drinks that I look forward to cashing in on.

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However, even if I did not stand to personally benefit from Head Coach Lincoln Riley’s benching of Moss, I still think it was far and away the right decision.

There is no one simple fix or one singular issue with this USC (4-5, 2-5 Big Ten) team — there are multiple — but Moss just hasn’t been able to get it done when it matters. Much has been spoken about USC’s inability to hang onto a fourth-quarter lead. But not much has been talked about how, in every one of these games, the Trojans had the ball with time on the clock to go down the field and answer with a game-winning score.

Three of their five losses ended with Moss and the offense turning the ball over on downs with time still on the clock; the other two games ended with Moss throwing interceptions. The full brunt of the blame can’t be shouldered on Moss for being in those positions, but if you expect to be a good college football team, you need a quarterback to be able to produce in those situations at the very least some of the time. Moss just wasn’t able to do that.

His passing statistics look great on paper, but whenever I watched him, I never felt like I was watching some amazing quarterback. He knew the system he played in very well and was consistently able to hit his first open reads. But repeatedly, he’d throw an errant interception that would just leave you scratching your head. Moss has the most interceptions of any player in Big Ten conference play. It was getting out of hand.

The quarterback change was needed to give USC a much-needed breath of fresh air after being suffocated by painstaking losses in four of its last five games.

With all that said, I don’t think Moss is a horrible player. I know, I know, I’m walking back my argument. But in general, and especially in this case, it’s not an all-or-nothing deal. Benching Moss is not going to immediately make USC good and blow out all of itstheir opponents. The problems the Trojans have are much bigger than Moss.

Maybe Moss’s mom’s cryptic tweets are working on me, but I do agree that Moss is definitely being used as a scapegoat for Riley. It’s an easy fix for the man at the helm of the program to shift the blame onto someone else. What I do hope this quarterback change brings is a shift in playcalling.

Riley refuses to run the ball. About midway through the first quarter of last week’s game against Washington, Fox Sports put up an alarming graphic. In road games, the Trojans run the ball just 31% of the time. Thirty-one percent! That is unbelievable and is the lowest out of any team in the Division I FBS Independents.

Again, benching Moss won’t automatically fix that number, but maybe it helps get Riley more normalcy with his play-calling. Historically, Riley has always had a dual-threat quarterback under center, and Moss just wasn’t that. However, redshirt sophomore quarterback Jayden Maiava is the epitome of dual -threat.

Maiava rushed for 277 yards and three touchdowns last year at UNLV and has already rushed for one in limited playing time in cardinal and gold. Maiava can be the spark plug this offense will need in order to get a bowl game qualification. I’m excited to see what he can do against Nebraska and if he can show out where Moss didn’t.

I’m rooting for Maiava to prove himself and show off what he did last year with the Rebels. But if the same things keep happening and USC continues to drop games in awful fashion, it will become even clearer who the common denominator is.

Stefano Fendrich is a senior writing about his opinions on some of sports’ biggest debates in his column, “The Great Debate,” which runs every other Thursday. He is also the managing editor at the Daily Trojan.