Tag: USC Football Report Card

USC Report Card for Notre Dame: Caleb Williams gets an F

This report card won’t deal with the USC defense, since it was surprisingly peripheral to the outcome against Notre Dame.

We never thought we would do this. We never thought this could possibly happen. We never thought we would be in this position. Yet, here we are.

We are in a spot where we have to give Caleb Williams the worst possible grade in our USC report card.

Caleb Williams, the 2022 Heisman Trophy winner who came back this season with big expectations and dreams under head coach Lincoln Riley, started this season brilliantly. He was awesome in the first three quarters against Colorado as well. However, in the last quarter of the Colorado game and in the eight quarters since then, he and the USC offense have steadily collapsed.

This is a very weird USC report card, folks. The defense was almost entirely irrelevant to the outcome of this game, a plot twist no one expected. Our grades will focus on the offense, and the players who all failed to do their jobs at great cost to the Trojans:

USC report card from emotionally exhausting 48-41 win over Colorado

It’s the same old story, and it’s going to rob USC of glory if changes aren’t made.

One week ago, in our report card on the USC-Arizona State game, we wrote the following about Alex Grinch’s Trojan defense:

“Tackling was bad. Positioning was bad. Defensive line play was bad before the undermanned ASU offensive line finally wore down in the fourth quarter and USC feasted up front.

“USC’s defensive line was smacking around ASU’s offensive line in the fourth quarter, but that didn’t happen very much in the first three quarters. ASU running back Cam Skattebo made USC look foolish for most of the night. His touchdown which made the score 35-28 in the fourth quarter was a display of great effort, but also atrocious tackling.”

Did USC make big strides from the Arizona State game? No. The first half was decent but the second half undid a lot of the good work the Trojans performed before halftime. Playing well for 30 of 60 minutes just doesn’t fly, and it definitely won’t fly against Washington or Oregon.

Let’s go to the Colorado report card. Offensive superstars and one defensive player get top grades, but everyone else can’t get graded too highly:

USC report card for completely unacceptable performance vs Arizona State

Championship teams don’t play like this. Lincoln Riley would agree. Being appropriately harsh is not ‘being a hater.’ We need to see real accountability.

We had some people tell us on Twitter, after the Arizona State game on Saturday night, that our harsh view of USC’s performance is just an outsized reaction meant to get clicks. Wait a minute: You mean a harsh view of this performance isn’t warranted? You mean USC shouldn’t aspire to high standards? You mean this performance was acceptable and okay under the circumstances?

Sure, this was the first road game of the season, but it’s not as though USC was playing at Utah or Oregon. This was Arizona State. The Sun Devils beat Southern Utah at home by only three points. They lost by 29 to Fresno State at home. They got shut out by Fresno State at home. Tempe is not a very intimidating place to play when ASU is bad.

This Arizona State team was missing 10 starters and four starting offensive linemen. It wasn’t a good team to begin with, and it was missing lots of key players at important positions.

USC was favored by 35 points.

ASU had the ball early in the fourth quarter with a chance to take the lead.

We shouldn’t be harsh toward the Trojans? We’re doing this just for clicks? I thought we aspired to championships and championship-level greatness at USC. This was plainly unacceptable, and if you think that’s being too harsh, we don’t know what else to tell you.

Let’s open up the report card. It’s not going to be pretty, and it shouldn’t be:

USC football report card for 56-10 win over Stanford

This was like a 1990 NFC-over-AFC Super Bowl wipeout. The Trojans were the 49ers. Stanford was the Denver Broncos.

We have to begin with an admission of the obvious: Stanford didn’t test USC. This was not a test. This was another scrimmage, another preseason game. Backups played the whole second half. Under 20 minutes into this game, the score was 35-0 and the competitive phase of play was over.

Miller Moss frankly could have been inserted into the game that quickly, but Lincoln Riley wanted Caleb Williams and the first-team offense to play through to the end of the first half, which was reasonable enough. Moss did start the third quarter and therefore got the whole second half. He deserved it, and it’s a testament to the quality of USC’s play that Moss was able to get a whole half of work. It shows the game was put to bed early on a Saturday night.

When a team does that, it earns good grades.

But: It was still only Stanford.

Let’s go to the report card for USC:

USC football report card for 66-14 win over Nevada

These grades for the Nevada game reflect the improvement the defense made, but they also account for the opponent.

The USC defense looked better against Nevada than it did against San Jose State. That’s the big story for the Trojans coming out of their September 2 game versus the Wolf Pack.

However, Nevada is a worse team than San Jose State. The Trojans figured to have an easier time against the Wolf Pack than they did versus the Spartans.

A very intriguing question after this game: Was the improvement from the first game to the second game more a product of guys settling into their roles, or of the caliber of opponent decreasing? It’s probably a little of both, but we do need to keep that in mind when evaluating this roster, and more specifically the defense.

The grades we gave out against San Jose State were not good. The grades we will give out here for the Nevada game are better … but let’s not assume USC has figured it out yet on defense. It’s too early in the season to say that.

Our grades will be better, but not fawning. Realism — honesty — is always the best approach.

Here is the report card:

USC football report card for San Jose State

Football games are back. That means Sunday grades for #USC are back. Alex Grinch’s grade? It isn’t good, let’s put it that way.

Class is in session for USC. Coaches and players are in the midst of a crash course in teaching the game of football. The Trojans beat San Jose State on Saturday, 56-28, in a game which should have fans moderately concerned.

We say “moderately” because it’s too early to panic. First games will be rough and sloppy. We need to see if bad trends persist before getting really worried. However, after a full offseason, and given the increased depth USC established on defense in the transfer portal, even the most pessimistic Trojan fans had to be disapproving of this performance.

Fans grumbling about this USC defensive effort are not overreacting. Let’s put it that way. Coaches were clear in saying they had more talent, they had more depth, they had more bodies, they had more pieces. The coaches did not back away from saying they had something better on defense this season.

Need proof and documentation? Here’s one link.

Here’s another.

The message could not have been clearer this season: No excuses. Get it done on Saturday.

The USC defense did not “get it done” on its first Saturday of the season.

With that, we’ll lead you into our first USC report card of the 2023 campaign:

USC report card: handing out grades to Trojans after brutal defensive collapse vs Cal

Yes, #USC plainly flunked on defense. No C-minus or D-plus grades in the secondary. This was a true foul-up, which starts with the letter F.

The USC Trojans are getting used to games like this … which is not a good thing. In all candor, we did think the larger 2022 season was going to be like this: offense great, defense bad. However, it did come as a surprise that the Trojans made California Golden Bear quarterback Jack Plummer look like Aaron Rodgers for much of the game, especially the fourth quarter.

It did come as a shock that Cal’s bad offensive line and generally unreliable offense were able to move the ball so easily against the Trojans.

USC’s defense was actually not terrible in the first half of the season. No, it wasn’t especially good (except for the Oregon State and Washington State games), but it wasn’t horrible.

This? This is horrible.

Let’s go to the grades. We will not take it easy on this defense. No one should.