USC Dominates Rice With a Pick-Six Party in the Coliseum

There was a pick-six party in the Coliseum on Saturday. USC defenders returned three interceptions for touchdowns and the Trojans posted a dominant 66-14 win against Rice in head coach Lincoln Riley’s debut.

Safety Calen Bullock and linebackers Shane Lee and Ralen Goforth recorded the defensive scores as USC tied a Pac-12 record with the three interceptions returned for scores. Safety Xamarion Gordon recorded a fourth interception for good measure.

“How do you start with anything but the three pick-sixes?” Riley asked to open his postgame press conference. “That was a really cool thing for us, defensively.”

But all the defensive highlights couldn’t completely overshadow the offensive performance.

USC quarterback Caleb Williams put together an extremely efficient game. He completed 19-of-22 passes for 249 yards and two touchdowns. Williams added 68 yards rushing on six attempts and was everything he was advertised to be after a phenomenal freshman season at Oklahoma.

“I thought he played very much in control and very much at ease,” Riley said. “Which, I think, when quarterbacks are playing at a high level, often times it looks like that.”

Williams said the offense came into the game playing with a lot of confidence, despite the relative lack of in-game snaps together.

“We built that through workouts,” Williams said. “We built that through PRPs and we built that through spring ball. Coming together, all one. One heartbeat. It takes a lot of reps. Maximum effort. Second efforts to make it look like that for our first game.”

Unstoppable Offense

This is the expected performance for this Riley offense at USC. Rice was a terrible defensive team last season and they won’t be in the mix with Utah, Notre Dame and the rest of the teams on USC’s schedule. But USC has faced poor defenses over the past handful of seasons and not been that efficient against them.

Jordan Addison caught his first pass as a Trojan on the first offensive snap of the game. He finished with a team-high five catches for 54 yards and two touchdowns. Addison was used in a few different ways and clearly targeted on a few plays by Williams.

“It was definitely fun and that’s why I’m here,” Addison said of getting involved in the offense. “I knew i was going to be a big piece to this puzzle that we’re building right now. It was just a start. Glad to go 1-0.”

USC scored on its first six offensive drives of the game, which included five touchdowns and a field goal.

Rice head coach Mike Bloomgren doesn’t think that’s a one-off.

“That’s a dynamic offense,” he said. “I guess they’re gonna do that to a lot of people.”

Brown Makes a Statement

USC fans got a chance to see true freshman Raleek Brown get involved as well. Brown rushed six times for 36 yards, including a 14-yard touchdown where he took a handoff from Williams with a defender in front of him and simply disappeared around the left end for a score. Brown also had a dynamic catch-and-run play that covered 40 yards. He came up limping after that play and was removed from the game. There was no update after the game against his health status.

None of the players were surprised by Brown’s performance. They’d been raving about him all fall camp.

“He showed us that all fall camp,” Addison said. “He just showed ya’ll that today. You got a chance to see it. We’ve been seeing it. He’s going to be an explosive threat for us.”

Running back Austin Jones rushed four times for 48 yards and two touchdowns. Running back Travis Dye rushed six times for 36 yards and caught three passes for 21 yards. Wide receiver Tahj Washington caught four passes for a team-high 65 yards. In total, a dozen players caught at least one pass and seven logged at least one rushing attempt.

“You can’t just key in on one player,” Addison said. “We’ve got too many weapons. And hopefully we’re going to put up 50 a game.”

Defensive Issues Early

Asked what he’d like to see improve on the defensive side against Stanford, Riley couldn’t help but start with a joke.

“Hopefully we get four pick-sixes next week,” Riley said. “That’d be awesome.”

USC’s defensive issues were on display early. Rice has a 16-play, 74-yard touchdown drive on its first possession. A 55-yard run straight up the middle of the USC defense kicked off Rice’s third possession. But after Bullock stepped in front of a pass and took it 93 yards the other way to put the Trojans up 28-7 with 8:05 left in the first half, Rice gained just 127 yards of offense the rest of the way.

It wasn’t about any specific coaching adjustments.

“The mistakes that we had in the first half as far as the run game were all self-inflicted,” Goforth said. “We just weren’t fitting out run fits correctly. There was nothing to really adjust. The main message going into halftime was just execute and do our job.”

Riley echoed that sentiment. He said a few busts in the run game came from defenders not doing their job.

“Whether we’re supposed to be leveraging a block, spilling a block and we came out of it, that’s when there were some of the creases in there,” Riley said.