The USC defense came up with several fourth-quarter sacks and multiple second-half turnovers which prevented Arizona State from winning Saturday night’s game.
When the score was 27-21 USC, the Trojans led ASU by just one score. The Sun Devils had the ball with a chance to take the lead. The USC defense needed to stand tall. It did. Consecutive stops, some of them concluding with takeaways, enabled USC to gain a 35-21 lead. The Trojans allowed a touchdown to let their lead dwindle to 35-28, but they restored a two-score advantage shortly thereafter and won 42-28. USC’s defense made timely plays in the fourth quarter. That’s good.
What about the first three quarters, however? Those 45 minutes (minutes the last few minutes of the third quarter) were bad. Alex Grinch rightly and reasonably caught a lot of criticism.
Let’s see what that criticism looked like: