Alex Grinch on the USC Defense Facing Firsts and Adversity

Alex Grinch has had the best view of anybody when it comes to a USC defense looking to completely turn itself around after a dismal showing in 2021. But with Saturday’s game time ticking closer, even he still seems a bit unsure about what he’ll see.

Asked following Wednesday’s practice to give his evaluation of the USC defense at this point, Grinch gave an answer right in his wheelhouse of tough love and needing to see things proven on the field before he’ll buy in.

“We’ll know Saturday around 3 pm,” he said.

While all the coaches are working with a new cast of characters, the offensive side led by head coach Lincoln Riley has the benefit of Riley’s previous relationship with starting quarterback Caleb Williams. No such familiarity existed with Grinch and the defensive leaders.

“It’s a lot of firsts,” Grinch said of Saturday. “You wish it wasn’t…How are we going to take the field on Saturday at 3 o’clock? Those are the things you don’t know. We’ll have 11 guys ready. Try to get 22 guys ready.”

Grinch said the defense has to maximize these final 48 hours before game time, when things shift from very physical Tuesday and Wednesday practices to the more mental Thursday and Friday editions.

Some players on that side of the ball are still learning Grinch’s ways, evidently.

“You cannot practice slow, play fast,” he said. “There’s only so much you can do over the course of the work week, physical-wise. Because you’ve got to stay healthy. And man did we put it into those two days. So I think we accomplished that. Kicking and screaming in some cases. Still guys learning our expectations for game week. You tell them, but some…they don’t quite believe you when you say we’re going to play the game twice. It’s what we believe in.”

There might not be the same amount of contact the next two days, but the intense preparation for the game remains.

“Now the mental thing goes through the roof,” Grinch said. “If we can’t stress you physically, we’re going to stress you mentally. We don’t take any days off. We have a lot more to accomplish this week.”

Saturday It’s For Real

Grinch said it took a little time for the urgency shown by the players to make the urgency shown by the coaches. He’s curious how that will play out this weekend.

“How urgent can we become?” he said. “How big of a chip on the shoulder can we have by Saturday at 3:00?”

There are two areas, specifically, Grinch is anxious to see when the Trojan defense takes the field against Rice.

“Adversity,” Grinch said. “We tell the guys on Friday, the one thing you’re promised on Saturday is adversity. You don’t know when it’s going to come. You don’t know how much it’s going to come. But ultimately, you’re in control of how you respond to it.”

Grinch said the coaches have a major responsibility in preparing the players to respond the right way. But until it happens in a game setting, there’s no way to predict the exact results.

“Really anxious to see how the guys respond to that,” he said. “It’s one thing to talk about it and you try to simulate things in practice. But that’s a major area for us.”

The second point is holding up physically, which the USC defense struggled to do last season as opponents piled up points consistently.

“You can only tackle so many times over the course of a fall camp, so we’ve got to make sure that we’re getting guys on the ground,” Grinch said. “Anticipate we’ll do a nice job of it. But we’ve got to go do it.”