The USC Trojans couldn’t ask for a more dramatic, heavily-hyped Homecoming game. Playing the #1 ranked Oregon Ducks in front of a spirited home crowd clad in cardinal to “Cardinal Out The Coliseum,” with Gameday in the house, on the night before Halloween is as big as it’s going to get for the bowl-banned 2010 Trojans.
USC needs quarterback Matt Barkley to excel against Oregon.
Last year, when the Trojans traveled to Eugene on Halloween, they were greeted with loud Oregon fans in “Fright Night” t-shirts – and for USC, the game was as horrifying as any of the Scream movies. The Ducks trampled the Trojans like USC had stolen their Halloween candy, running all over the field to a 47-20 win in what was, at the time, Pete Carroll’s worst loss as USC head coach.
Now it’s up to Lane Kiffin and his team to show the Ducks they’re not in Autzen anymore. And it won’t be easy.
Sophomore quarterback Matt Barkley will have to play like the Heisman candidate Kiffin thinks he’d be had the Trojans stayed undefeated. When the offense comes out firing, they’re hard to stop, as the Cal Bears found out. Barkley, who has 20 touchdowns and just four interceptions, has an incredibly talented set of weapons in wide receivers Ronald Johnson and Robert Woods. Woods, a true freshman, has blossomed over the last few games, and having two stellar receivers makes Barkley’s job a little easier, not that he had a shortage of targets. David Ausberry, Jordan Cameron, Rhett Ellison, Brice Butler, Brandon Carswell and even fullback Stanley Havili have caught touchdown passes this season.
The few times the passing game has been off, the ground game has picked up the slack. Havili, Allen Bradford, and Marc Tyler have all started for the Trojans, who have scored 12 rushing touchdowns. Freshman phenom Dillon Baxter, who missed playing time early for disciplinary reasons and more recently because of a toe injury, will be back on the field for the Trojans, and they’ll probably need him against the Ducks’ speedy D.
Oregon is a very, very good team, with a phenomenal running back in LaMichael James and a better-than-advertised quarterback in Darron Thomas. How good are they really? It’s hard to say, because they’re so fast – both between plays and whenever James has the ball in his hands – that it’s often just a big blur of green and yellow. The Ducks are 114th in the country in time of possession, but they’re first in total offense.
If they went head to head with one of the best teams in the country, would they win so decisively? Who knows? So far, they haven’t found a team that can keep up with them, but the numbers don’t lie: the Ducks are averaging more than 55 points and 569 yards per game – and anyone who’s watched the Trojans this season knows that the defense has not exactly been stout.
Actually, the USC defense surrendered more than 1000 yards in the team’s two losses this season – to Washington and at Stanford, both on last second field goals. In both games, the defense started crumbling before the game clock ran out, which doesn’t bode well against an Oregon team that is outscoring its opponents in the second half by a whopping 156-23.
Stanford and Arizona were both able to hang with the Ducks, at least for the first half, but most of the Ducks’ opponents simply can’t keep up. That might not be the case this week against USC. The Trojans are coming off a bye week, which might be one of their keys to winning this game. Oregon is coming off a not-exactly-taxing 60-13 win over UCLA last Thursday, but having that extra week to rest their legs and prepare for whatever really fast plays Oregon might have on its flash cards certainly can’t hurt.
Not that the Trojans got too much rest. Kiffin held speedy 6 a.m. practices chased with wind sprints during the bye week to condition his players to face one of the most exhausting opponents in the nation. He even let them tackle with the hope that a few tackling drills will prevent the kind of drives that led to those last-second losses.
Will it help? Some of Oregon’s opponents have tried – and failed – to slow the Ducks down. Maybe the trick isn’t to slow them down, but to play them at their speed, if you can, and beat them at their own fast-paced game. Two weeks of uptempo practices aren’t going to turn the Trojans into Ducks, but after just a week, DaJohn Harris noted the practices were becoming easier.
The Trojans who lost to Oregon last year, and to Washington and Stanford this season, were not the same Trojans who showed up two weeks ago to crush Cal at the Coliseum. Those Trojans played fast, they played sharp on offense and defense, and they played to win. It was the kind of Trojan football fans had come to expect, and it’s exactly how they need to play to have a shot at beating the Ducks (unless, as Jurrell Casey helpfully explained to the media, Oregon isn’t actually very good).
The extra week gave the Trojans time to work on their assignments and their conditioning, as well as their confidence. USC is no stranger to big games, but usually, they’re the ones at the top of the polls. They know what it’s like to be at the top (Oregon is #2 in the BCS rankings but #1 in the human polls) and they also know it’s a precarious place to be. They know that a top-ranked team could fall to an overlooked, seemingly over-matched opponent any Saturday – it happened the last three weeks – and few teams have been more of an afterthought this year than USC. It will take a colossal effort from the Trojans to upset the Ducks, but their chances go up exponentially when they’re playing on national television, in front of a Red Out Homecoming crowd the night before Halloween.
Can the Ducks’ speedy offense hold up in front of the Gameday cameras in the Coliseum, or will Lane Kiffin and the Trojans have a few tricks up their sleeve to treat viewers to USC’s best win of the season?
