Why USC has been getting dominated in the trenches, how to fix it

USC‘s 2023 season has certainly not gone how the team hoped, with five losses despite returning the 2022 Heisman Trophy winner in quarterback Caleb Williams.

On Saturday, USC lost its fifth game in the last six outings when UCLA simply imposed its will on the Trojans, repeatedly beating the offensive line.

“They lost Gino Quinones early in the year. They weren’t playing with Jarrett Kingston, who came down from Washington State,” said WeAreSC’s Erik McKinney on the Andy Staples On3 show. “So that was a line without two guys that you thought were starters this season. But that was varsity-JV, that game, the way UCLA’s defensive line just kind of manhandled the USC offensive line.”

While the wear and tear of a season can take its toll on any unit, it was more than just that leading to Saturday’s problems.

“If you go back and look at the ’18, ’19, ’20, ’21, those offensive line classes, they’re just littered with misses and guys you thought, ‘OK, well he’s maybe a developmental guy,'” McKinney said. “But you’ve got maybe one guy in each of those classes that have stuck and done it.”

That simply isn’t enough to field a competent line without help. The sheer newness of the group USC had this year as a result is partially to blame for the team’s struggles.

Coach Lincoln Riley opted to rely somewhat heavily on the transfer portal. And for the most part, those transfers haven’t really panned out. That’s a contrast from 2022.

“That 2022 team that Lincoln Riley took over had holes everywhere, but the offensive line was pretty good,” McKinney said. “Those were veteran players who had played a lot of football, and that was a group that kind of held everything together.

“But that’s not something that they had along the offensive line this year. You had all five guys playing new positions and nobody playing next to someone that they had played with before. So that’s a big lift this offseason is figuring out that offensive line and who’s going to be, first, your front-line starters and also the depth. Because they had one injury early in the year and you could just tell it decimated that line.”

If USC wants to fix the issues up front, it’ll take some patience and the right combination of things happening going forward.

Transfer portal takes can help some, but they’ll only get you so far.

“It started this past class, they brought in five true freshman offensive linemen in the 2023 class,” McKinney said. “They have a handful of pretty talented, it looks like, guys in the 2024 class. So you’re starting to recruit that.”