USC's last two losses have come on last second field goals
Defense might win championships, but even if the NCAA hadn’t prohibited USC from competing for a title, the Trojans’ defense wouldn’t let them win it anyway.
After USC’s offense came from behind four times, scoring touchdowns to reclaim the lead, the defense ultimately only had to hold fast for 68 seconds.
With under four minutes left, Matt Barkley led his team down the field on what should’ve been a ten-play, 51 yard game-winning drive. Stanford got the ball back with 1:08 left. 68 seconds is all it took for Andrew Luck to march the Cardinal down the field to give kicker Nate Whitaker a chance to stay perfect on field goal tries on the year. 68 seconds with a porous defense let them make winning in the last second, 37-35, look easy.
Last week, kicker Joe Houston took most of the heat for his missed field goal earlier in the game. Had he made it, Washington’s last second kick wouldn’t have given them the win.
This week, there’s no one to take the blame off the defense. Houston made all his extra points (unlike Stanford’s Nate Whitaker) and the offense was clicking so well it didn’t have to settle for field goals.
Between the run game and the passing game, USC’s offense has gotten the job done. Whether it’s fifth-year senior Allen Bradford running for over 200 yards as he did against Washington, true freshman WR Robert Woods exploding for 61 yards and two touchdowns against Stanford, or Robert Johnson and Matt Barkley’s spot-on, reliable connection that’s made plays all season, the offense works.
It’s not perfect – tight end Jordan Cameron missed a couple throws (although he’s lucky he walked away from one of the hits), Stanley Havili fumbled a handoff out of the Wildcat, and even RoJo had a perfect pass go through his normally sure fingertips. But in most of those instances, they made up for it on the next play.
The defense responded to missed tackles and blown coverages with more missed tackles and some costly penalties thrown in for good measure.
In the first quarter, Stepfan Taylor ran for 16 yards on one play and Chris Owusu had a 35-yard reception on the next; both plays were at least 5 yards longer than they should’ve been because USC couldn’t figure out how to wrap them up.
The Trojans defense didn’t look quite as bad as it has at other times, mainly because of a few key sacks and forced turnovers. Stanford gained 247 yards just in the first half, but the Cardinal turned the ball over twice in the half thanks to heads-up play by Shareece Wright and Jurrell Casey, who recovered fumbles. In fact, in those cases it was the offense that failed to turn those plays into points on the USC side of the board – but those missed opportunities wouldn’t matter quite so much if the defense could stop their opponents with any regularity.
The Stanford offense ran right through the USC defense – power-running straight up the middle. The Cardinal hit the Trojans defense in the mouth, plain and simple. They ran and ran and occasionally threw to unbelievable wide open receivers.
When the Trojans tried to pile up in the middle to stuff the run, Andrew Luck took off to the outside. When Luck overthrew receivers in the end zone, he got a new set of downs thanks to penalties for senseless pass interference. Michael Morgan’s hard hit that earned one of those calls, and Chris Galippo’s inexcusable personal foul late in the fourth gave the Cardinal an essential first down on the game-winning drive.
They’re the kind of hard hits the Trojans need to bring out after a receiver catches a ball, or before a running back breaks away for a huge gain – not after the whistle, and not at the goal line when the receiver had no shot at the ball anyway.
USC’s defense is playing desperate and playing frustrated; it used to be a monster unit and now everyone runs through it at will. There’s a sense of helplessness and shock, not swagger. They struggle to make the right reads, they seem hesitant to hit people, and they don’t know how to fix it. And according to head coach Lane Kiffin after the loss, neither does the coaching staff.
Until they figure it out, the offense can keep churning out long drives and beautiful touchdowns, but the Trojans will struggle to win games, let alone touchdowns.
