USC Report Card – Syndication Server

USC report card vs Arizona: Lincoln Riley, Alex Grinch both get an F

This is tiresome, exhausting and unacceptable. No accountability. It’s going to get ugly if things don’t get fixed.

USC is 6-0, and that’s better than being 5-1 with the season basically being over. It would have been over if the Trojans had lost to Arizona. Let’s be real: USC is highly unlikely to beat both Washington and Oregon. The Trojans would do really well just to split those two games. Giving away a game to Arizona — which USC very nearly did — would have basically put USC in a position where the Trojans would have been unlikely to make the Pac-12 Championship Game.

Not making the Pac-12 title game this year would be a clear and unmitigated disaster.

Even with the win and the 6-0 record, USC isn’t fooling anyone. The Trojans are not convincing experts that they are an elite team.

They aren’t.

They have the potential to be elite, but they aren’t playing like it. That’s on the coaches. Let’s go through yet another report card in which the grades aren’t good.

This time, they’re even worse than they were against Colorado and Arizona State.

Let’s open up the envelope and hand out some (very bad) grades to the Trojans:

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 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 report card: handing out grades after Trojans get smoked by Utah in Pac-12 Championship Game

Which grade will interest you the most as a #USC fan or observer after this game? Probably our grade for Alex Grinch. Get that and all other grades here:

When USC lost to Utah the first time back on October 15, the Trojans played well enough to win but were brutally unlucky and were the recipients of the very best game Cam Rising and Dalton Kincaid could possibly play. Not getting a fair shake on two separate huge roughing-the-passer calls made that game feel like a contest which was taken away or, at the very least, altered by forces USC couldn’t entirely control.

This game on Friday night in Las Vegas was different.

Utah smoked USC. The Utes were better. They were tougher. They were deeper. They were stronger. They exposed the Trojans at their weakest points and elicited the conversations we expected to have about this flawed USC team in 2022. It came at the worst possible time, but it happened.

Our grades for the Trojans will reflect that, and they will lead into some necessary — and inconvenient — conversations about this program heading into 2023:

USC report card: grading Trojans after 11th win of 2022 vs Notre Dame

Caleb Williams gets an A+ as a #Heisman QB, a punter, a defensive back (denying a Notre Dame INT), a leader — what can Caleb not do? #USC

Football games are fundamentally pass-fail tests, not term papers graded on an A-B-C-D-F scale. What matters most is that USC defeated Notre Dame, 38-27, to move to 11-1 on the season, one win away from a spot in the College Football Playoff.

The Trojans are not an airtight team, and they’re not an imposing, overwhelming two-way juggernaut on both offense and defense. However, their offense is definitely for real, and the simple fact that they have Caleb Williams and Lincoln Riley has been more than enough to lift them to 11 wins, the Pac-12 Championship Game, and a New Year’s Six bowl bid.

Let’s hand out the grades to the Trojans after another imperfect but winning effort, as this magnificent, overachieving season heads into December with big prizes on the table:

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.

USC Report Card: grading the Trojans after a very bumpy ride in Tucson

#USC was missing lots of key players, so this report card will definitely grade on a curve. Surviving Arizona was the goal. Box checked.

The USC defense couldn’t make one or two key plays against Utah late in the fourth quarter of the Trojans’ Week 7 game on Oct. 15. Not having Eric Gentry in the lineup certainly mattered in those final minutes.

With Gentry still out for this past Saturday’s Week 9 game versus Arizona, and with linebacker Ralen Goforth also out, USC was extremely threadbare at linebacker. This doesn’t include an additional injury absence for Korey Foreman, who also did not play against the Wildcats.

With all these limitations, how should one go about grading the USC defense? Well, we’re about to tell you, so here’s our latest report card, starting with the defense: