Musings from Arledge: Tackling the USC Defensive Issues

“And oftentimes excusing of a fault doth make the fault worse by the excuse….”

— William Shakespeare, King John

It may be impossible to be a great leader without loyalty. But misplaced loyalty can be as destructive as a lack of loyalty.

Lincoln Riley has an important question to answer: Am I willing to bet my career on this defensive staff? He should be fair to Alex Grinch, in part because stability is valuable. But he needs to be careful not to excuse Grinch’s faults just for the sake of personal loyalty.

Bowls aren’t what they used to be. And in some important respects, USC’s season ended when it lost to Utah the first week of December. But the Cotton Bowl wasn’t meaningless, and it showed what most of us already knew: USC is a bad defensive football team, and the problem is getting worse, not better.

I’ll go so far as to say that the Cotton Bowl was one of the most embarrassing defensive performances I’ve seen from a USC team. If you watched the game, I shouldn’t have to go through many numbers to prove my point. But here’s a few. The Trojans gave up 46 points, 539 yards, touchdowns on six of Tulane’s ten drives, and over 10 yards per play. Amazingly, USC managed to give up nine plays of 20 yards or more, including five plays of 40 yards or longer, and three plays of at least 59 yards. And according to ESPN.com, they didn’t have a single tackle for loss on any of Tulane’s 34 run plays.

That’s awful. It’s almost beyond description awful. And it’s not exactly out of the blue.

In USC’s final eight games after the 6-0 start, USC gave up 35 or more points six times and 43 or more four times. Yes, you heard that right; USC gave up 43 or more points in half of their last eight games after starting 6-0.

I think we all knew that USC’s defense would struggle. The roster was seriously depleted when Riley arrived, and while he managed to add a few important pieces, he did not remake the defensive roster in the transfer portal the way he remade the offensive roster.

So the question Lincoln Riley needs to answer is this: Do I have a downright horrible group of defensive players or is my defensive staff letting us down by failing to get even decent production out of a mediocre group of players?

I’ve been trying to stay patient on Alex Grinch. But turning in that kind of performance with a month to prepare is inexcusable. The tackling was atrocious. Guys were consistently out of position. The secondary gives away big plays the way Santa gives out toys.

If Grinch had Riley’s track record as a coordinator, you might overlook one horrible season. He doesn’t. He had a spotty track record before this year. It’s hard to feel good about keeping him on staff with Jim Leonhard and Jimmy Lake still looking for work.

And I think Lincoln Riley should think seriously about promoting Donte Williams … to Chief Fundraiser for the Athletic Department. Williams must be one hell of a salesman. His ability to recruit is astounding considering just how badly two different groups of players have performed under his tutelage. Let’s get him where he can do some good: raising money for NIL dollars. The guy can sell ice to eskimos. But his secondary still can’t cover or tackle anybody.

And maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this defensive staff really is the best Riley can assemble. If so, USC has an enormous talent problem on defense, and we better hope he can land a bus-load of defensive talent in the portal. Because if he doesn’t, he’s going to waste college football’s Patrick Mahomes for two consecutive years before losing him to the NFL.

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No, the defense wasn’t the only thing that cost USC that game. We’ve been talking for some time about how a special teams error would eventually cost USC a game. Congratulations, my fellow Trojans! Your prediction was accurate. Trying to catch that kickoff at the one-yard line made zero sense. At the same time, USC had a guy deep on that kickoff who doesn’t ordinarily man that spot. So I guess when you put a guy in a pressure-field situation who isn’t used to filling that role, bad things might happen.

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There was some good, obviously. Caleb Williams is a monster. Yes, he made some mistakes, and I thought he looked hesitant to run (for reasons that are understandable). But I’m not going to criticize Caleb Williams. He is the best player in the country, one of the best college football players I’ve ever seen, and if USC had even a halfway decent defense, I’m not sure anybody could beat them.

Jerry Rice’s kid looked like Jerry Rice’s kid. Fantastic performance from a guy who has received his share of criticism this year.

Raleek Brown is starting to figure it out and is on the verge of becoming the guy we expected him to be. Look out next year. This guy is explosive, and he’s only going to get better.

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Let me leave you with this thought. It’s hard to win all your games when you rely on your offense to outscore the other guys every week. This is true because you have to be substantially better than your opposition or shockingly lucky to go undefeated.

I’m going to use NFL numbers on this, because the data is easier to find. But the principle is true for college football as well.

A team that is favored by 10 points has about an 84% chance of winning. That’s a big point spread, yet that upset likelihood is not small. Look at it this way, the likelihood that a favorite will lose one of two games when it’s favored by 10 in both of them is about 30%. In other words, it’s about this same likelihood that Mike Trout will get a hit on any single at bat. Put in those terms, it’s not at all unlikely that a team will lose one of two consecutive games when it’s favored by 10 in both of them. We should expect it to happen all the time.

Let’s take this a step further. Imagine that a team is favored by 14 points in all of its games. That means it has about a 90% chance of winning each of them. Yet there is a 75% likelihood that team loses at least one time in a 13-game season.

What does this mean? It means you are highly unlikely to ever go undefeated unless you are very good on both sides of the ball. It’s undisputed that you must have a high-powered offense to win in modern college football. Everybody gives up points to good offenses. Ask Michigan and Georgia.

But it’s also true that you need to get stops, because if the other team can score in bunches, you’re going to find yourself in a lot of close games. And everybody loses close games close to 50% of the time. Nick Saban has won about 60% of his one-score games (at least that was true a few years ago; I don’t have updated stats). And this actually understates just how likely it is that Nick Saban will lose a close game, because these statistics include all of the games where one team scores at the end of a game to pull within one score. And I’m willing to bet a large amount of money that in Nick Saban’s career, the number of times that the opponent scored late to pull within one score after trailing by two scores is a whole lot more than the number of times Alabama has scored late to make the game close.

The bottom line, I think, is that Lincoln Riley likely will not win a national title unless he has a defense that is well above average. He can win a lot of games with a great offense (which he will have) and a mediocre defense (which he doesn’t yet have; this defense is far from mediocre right now). But mediocre defenses will put you in a lot of close games against good offensive teams, and you’re going to lose about half of those close games. Lincoln Riley can win 10-12 games a year with an amazing offense. To challenge Nick Saban and Kirby Smart, he needs a top-20 defense. USC is light years away from that right now.

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Well, that’s not the outcome any of us wanted. But it certainly wasn’t boring. USC went from extremely difficult to watch to must-watch TV. But I, for one, could handle a little bit more boredom at this point. Can we please have some 45-10 games next season?