Musings from Arledge: USC is not getting better

Lou Holtz says, “You’re never as good as everyone tells you when you win, and you’re never as bad as they say when you lose.” 

Let’s hope so.

Rather remarkably, for a program that has the reputation of being great offensively and terrible defensively, USC was adequate on defense against the Irish and darn near dreadful everywhere else. After seeing the great offense/terrible defense thing for a year and a half, you might wonder if a change of pace could be a welcome development. It wasn’t.

Watching the train wreck unfold, I thought about my college baseball coach. He was a weird, old guy. I’d tell you some stories, but I couldn’t do them justice. How do you explain a little guy, old as dirt, who challenged every member of the team to go out on the sidewalk with him so he could punch them “right square in the mouth?” You can’t. You just had to be there, I guess. Anyway, he told us a story once about a football team that chose to kick off every time it gave up a touchdown. I think he claimed he was officiating the game, which might explain why the referee was even asking such a stupid question. (I played in a lot of football games, and I never remember being asked whether we wanted to kick off or receive after the other team had scored.) My coach argued in favor of this unconventional strategy, saying there are “more ways to score on defense.”

That’s crazy, of course, and only a lunatic would do it. I’m about 97% sure the story didn’t even happen, and that crazy old bastard was just making stuff up. I mean, even if there were more ways to score on defense, they are still far less likely to happen, which means taking the football is a sound strategy, don’t you think? But this USC-Notre Dame game was about as close as you’ll ever see to a game that would support coach’s insanity. When you have a special teams TD, a defensive TD, and scoring drives after turnovers of only 2 and 12 yards each, you’re getting awfully close to winning a game without needing your offense at all. That’s 28 points from only 14 yards of offense. Notre Dame’s offense could have taken the night off—you know, like they have for much of the last month. Has a team ever scored 48 points with only 13 first downs and 251 total yards? That must be a record, right?

We knew before the South Bend debacle that USC isn’t an elite football team. We knew they could easily lose to the Irish. It’s hard to win on the road. It’s especially hard to win in South Bend. Victories there are hard to come by.

But I didn’t expect that kind of meltdown. Even Caleb Williams was bad. That’s the first time I’ve written that sentence. It didn’t help that his offensive line was worse—shockingly bad, really. Notre Dame’s front seven humiliated them all night. Notre Dame also was not worried in the slightest by USC’s receivers, who were not a threat and had trouble catching and holding onto the football. Of course, the offense and special teams collected devastating penalties the way the Kardashians collect shoes. USC was constantly starting inside its own 10-yard-line after special teams penalties, and the offense managed to have huge plays, including a trying touchdown run by Caleb Williams, negated by holding and offensive pass interference calls. 

And the defense, which played pretty well, still had to contribute to the act when it truly mattered. At 24-13, with momentum and a chance to get back in the game, Alex Grinch called the Grinch Special: man coverage with no deep help and no extra rushers. This has been a problem through his entire tenure, and we again see why. Having your nickel in man coverage without help against the other team’s best receiver is not good. Having that setup when you’re rushing only four and not getting pressure is hard to explain. I’m not sure why Alex Grinch doesn’t agree with my simple proposition, but he apparently doesn’t. Everybody has their thing, and leaving defensive backs defenseless, apparently, is Alex Grinch’s. So USC gives up a touchdown this way almost every week. It’s becoming a tradition, like playing Tusk or kicking the flag pole.

Did I miss anything? It’s hard to remember all of the things you hated during a performance like that. True, we got Zachariah Branch back, and he did Zachariah Branch things. That was fun. Everything else was torture.

And this game now raises a whole series of uncomfortable questions. When Lincoln Riley was hired, most USC fans believed he faced a multi-year rebuilding job in light of the depths to which the program had sunk. We got fooled into thinking otherwise, because USC was probably one Caleb Williams hamstring pull from a playoff berth in his first year. We thought the program was ready to join the ranks of the elite.

We know now that USC is light years from being elite. Only the most delusional sunshine pumpers of our tribe — God bless ‘em — could possibly think otherwise. 

So let’s do a little thought experiment. Imagine that Clay Helton is still the coach and USC has a typical Clay Helton roster but, instead of Kedon Slovis, Clay has Caleb Williams. Would that team look any different than this one? I’m not sure it would. We’d have the same devastating penalties. The same tackling issues. The same lack of discipline. The same soft, uninspired line play. The same loyalty to assistant coaches who should have been given one-way bus tickets to Guadalajara long ago. 

Lincoln Riley is 17-4 at USC because Caleb Williams is immensely talented. Riley would be 13-8, maybe worse, if Kedon Slovis or JT Daniels had been running this operation. 

Alabama is a team without a quarterback. USC looks like a quarterback without a team.

Once that sinks in, the uncomfortable questions don’t go away. What can salvage this situation? Better players? Because here’s the thing: I do think you can credit Riley and staff with solid talent evaluation in their first, full recruiting class. There are some very good players in that group, including some under-the-radar guys. 

At the same time, it’s also clear that Dan Lanning is currently eating Lincoln Riley’s lunch in the recruiting department. He’s bullying Riley on the recruiting trail the way Notre Dame’s defensive line bullies USC’s O line. Maybe that’s mostly NIL, although I wouldn’t dismiss how good Lanning and staff are as recruiters. That’s what all of those guys do. It’s what they’re known for. I didn’t think they could actually coach when he put together his staff, but I had no doubt they could recruit. 

But, fine, let’s say it’s all NIL. And let’s assume that USC is losing recruiting battles because it has decided it will not engage in pay-for-play. 

That just means Lincoln Riley is taking another huge gamble. He’s gambling that he can upgrade in the transfer portal enough to catch the teams that are recruiting high school talent at a far higher level. Will it work? Maybe. But I’d note that the teams that are elite today—Georgia, Bama, Ohio State, etc.—are not using this strategy. They are supplementing in the portal, but they are still doing what great programs have always done: recruiting loads of blue-chip high school players. Lincoln chooses to lose recruiting battles for the best players because he wants to recruit with his money-bag hand tied behind his back, and he hopes to catch up in the transfer portal. We can only hope this gamble pays off more handsomely than Riley’s offseason gamble on Alex Grinch.

And there’s one other thing that bothers me about this Lanning comparison. Lanning’s staff of young recruiters seems to be coaching better, too. I didn’t expect that. True, Lanning pretty consistently makes foolish decisions that hurt his team. But apart from that, his teams look well-coached. They look tough and disciplined. They block, they tackle, they cover. They look like a program that will still be okay when Bo Nix leaves. 

Does USC look like a program that will be okay when Caleb Williams leaves? Because I’m kind of getting the vibe that they’re Wham! after George Michael leaves.

Maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe I’m just angry because I spent a bunch of money to sit in the cold and listen to taunts from Domer fans. Maybe this is just a tough night on the road, which is the spin Lincoln Riley puts on it. But I don’t think so. USC is not getting better. This team is worse than last year’s team. This team is worse now than it was a month ago. Even the things we thought were a given are now question marks. I would have bet a large sum that USC’s offense would be elite. After Stanford, I thought this offense was the best in the country. 

But it’s not. It’s not close. The way things are trending, it may not be the best in the city by the end of the season. You can’t have an elite offense when your offensive line is completely inept, and right now, that’s what this USC offensive line is. Notre Dame rushed four all night and completely overwhelmed the Trojans’ offense. Bullied them. Embarrassed them. Beat up on their star quarterback. Ended his Heisman chances. USC made a decent Notre Dame defense look like Buddy Ryan’s Bears. That should be a giant, flashing, neon, warning sign. If Notre Dame can overwhelm USC’s offense that way, what will Utah do? Or UCLA? Or Oregon in the hostile confines of Autzen Stadium?

I wrote last week that we should re-set expectations for this USC team, that this team was not elite and that we should not judge them by that yardstick. But I’m deeply worried that even that analysis set the bar way too high. The team we watched last night in South Bend not only isn’t elite; it’s not even good. It’s a mess. And the trajectory of Lincoln Riley’s program has reached an inflection point. If USC comes out Saturday, plays good defense against a pretty lousy Utah offense, and protects Caleb Williams so the USC offense can look like its old self again, then maybe we can start to buy into Lincoln Riley’s nonchalant response to this last month of really ugly football. But if USC doesn’t do that, we’re in danger of seeing the wheels come off. 

I dearly hope that doesn’t happen. And if I’m being completely honest—and what’s the point of writing these things if I’m not?—I’m just really tired of USC getting pushed around. Utah has been almost unwatchable on offense this entire season. But at least their fans get a team that goes out every week and tries to punch the other guys in the face. I want a USC team that tries to do that. That’s the core of football; it’s in the very DNA of the sport. And last night, this USC team went to college football’s greatest venue to play its most important rival and was unwilling to throw a punch. The Trojans weren’t bullies. They were victims. In my preview article last week, I quoted Churchill. We got Chamberlain instead. 

There are a lot of ways to lose a football game. Blown assignments. Penalties. Dropped passes. The list is long and varied. USC has in recent years sampled most of them. But there is one way of losing that should never be accepted at USC: letting your opponent beat you up. 

Lincoln Riley, his staff, and his players better figure things out in a hurry. Because there are a whole string of teams on the horizon that smell blood in the water and can’t wait to victimize USC. USC will either figure out how to be the bullies or they will continue to be hapless victims who look no different than the worst exemplars of the Clay Helton era. 

Lincoln Riley has shown some frustration with the criticism his team and staff taken over the last few weeks from people with “untrained eyes.” His answers to tough questions have gotten a little snippy. But, Lincoln, don’t forget that our thousands of untrained eyes write the checks that keep your program viable. You only work if our untrained eyes are seeing something they like. 

And you’re not getting paid a Nick Saban salary to deliver a Clay Helton product.