Lincoln Riley on USC's Offensive Struggles Against Oregon State
The USC offense hadn’t been flawless heading into last Saturday’s matchup against Oregon State. Stanford kept USC out of the endzone in the second half of their Week 2 matchup and Fresno State forced more than a few first-half incompletions from quarterback Caleb Williams. But the Trojans still managed to score more than 40 points against both teams and the offense established itself as the clear strength of this team.
Against Oregon State, USC did not score a touchdown until the fourth quarter and the Trojans generated more than 100 total yards in just one quarter.
Riley isn’t typically involved in what he termed a defensive slugfest. But he’s had a few. Last season, Oklahoma beat West Virginia 16-13 when the Sooners kicked two fourth-quarter field goals to win it. And the Sooners scored just 14 points in a 27-14 loss to Baylor.
“I think all of our patience got tested and at times I think offensively we were, me first and foremost, but all of us guilty of maybe losing our patience a little bit at times and trying to make a little bit too much happen,” Riley said Monday night on the Trojans Live radio show. “Oregon State is a really good defense and they gave us some problems. But also, we created a lot of problems for ourselves that I felt like we were going to get past.”
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It didn’t erase all the struggles, but the USC offense did come through when it mattered most. The Trojans went 84 yards in 11 plays and 3:22, finishing the drive off with a 21-yard touchdown pass from Caleb Williams to Jordan Addison with a little more than a minute remaining.
“I think what patience we had did pay off in the end,” Riley said.
Riley doesn’t see anything about the Oregon State game forcing a “back to the drawing board” scenario for the USC offense. He said he watched the game about five times between the final whistle and Monday evening. He now hopes he can put the film away for “another 12 months.”
“Just agonizingly close,” Riley said of the offense. “Some of the small, little things that we did a little bit better in the first three games that turned into huge plays. There’s so many watching that game that are just one tiny thing away from being huge, game-changing, drive-changing plays that we just didn’t make very many of them in the first three quarters…We did the things that you can’t do to play good offensive ball. We had crucial penalties. We had assignment busts…And they did what good defenses do. They make you earn it and they didn’t really give us any gifts. And then for a large part of the game, we did not play sharp enough to take advantage of some of the things that were certainly there.”
