Georgia Bulldogs redshirt sophomore quarterback JT Daniels comes to UGA after spending the first two seasons of his career at USC
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Quarterback JT Daniels (No. 18):
Class: Redshirt Sophomore
Height: 6-3
Weight: 210 pounds
Hometown: Irvine, California
High School: Mater Dei High School
Georgia Bulldogs redshirt sophomore quarterback JT Daniels comes to UGA after spending the first two seasons of his career at USC. Daniels transferred from the Trojans following an ACL injury he suffered during the 2019 season opener. Daniels is still rehabbing the injury and isn’t fully cleared to play as of late Aug. 2020.
Daniels has an opportunity this season in Athens with the departure of Buffalo Bills quarterback Jake Fromm. He will compete with Jamie Newman, Carson Beck, and more for the starting job. The NCAA granted him immediate illegibility on his transfer.
Georgia’s quarterback position has more depth this season than during the 2019 season. Georgia will have several options ready to step up if the starter suffers an injury. Wake Forest transfer Jamie Newman is projected to be the starter.
In three seasons at the prestigious Mater Dei High School, JT Daniels averaged more than 50 touchdown passes and 4,000 passing yards per season. Daniels was rated as the third ranked quarterback in his recruiting class behind Trevor Lawrence and Justin Fields.
Daniels has solid experience from his days at USC. In 2018, Daniels threw for 14 touchdowns and 10 interceptions for the Trojans. At the very least he will provide the Georgia Bulldogs with a solid, experienced option as a back up. He’s got the talent to earn the starting role this season and beyond.
Nov 24, 2018; Los Angeles, CA, USA; Southern California Trojans quarterback JT Daniels throws a pass against the Notre Dame Fighting Irish at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Credit: Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports
The journey which brought Kedon Slovis to this point in his career.
Sports are a truly funny thing. One second you could be expecting to be a second-stringer for the foreseeable future, then in the next second you are the starting quarterback for the team, both now and in the future. That’s exactly what happened to USC quarterback Kedon Slovis.
Though he was trained by NFL Hall of Fame quarterback Kurt Warner, he thought he was coming to USC to sit behind blue-chip prospect J.T. Daniels, who had been named the starter his true freshman year. Instead Slovis is on a different journey, and it’s one that may take him to the promised land.
J.T. Daniels may not have been perfect as a freshman. He showed a lot of impatience and had plenty of problems turning the ball over, but he knew how to find his playmakers and wasn’t afraid to sling the rock all over the field. He trusted his receivers and they rewarded him time and again with astonishing plays. Then, however, Daniels hurt his ACL and suddenly found himself on the outside looking in. Daniels was a consummate teammate along with fellow future transfer Jack Sears.
When Slovis got his opportunity, he never looked back. The USC offense just looked different with him in charge. Kurt Warner has clearly taught him the subtle nuances of the position. He has drilled the finer points of footwork and timing into Slovis, and it shows. The patience, lack of mistakes, and understanding of where his targets are supposed to be at all times create a large part of what made the Slovis era easy to anticipate. I lost track of the number of times I said J.T. Daniels lost his job permanently when I was watching Slovis play last year. I even said when speaking with Derrik Klassen of Football Outsiders that Daniels had tons of improvement to make if he wanted to stave off competition.
USC QB J.T. Daniels need a little bit of work before next season. To talk about what needs improvement, what's working, & what coaches are and aren't doing to help him, I enlisted @QBKlass of Football Outsiders: https://t.co/9r1gw1Md27
It was apparent as soon as it was happening that Daniels was facing an uphill battle against the more polished Slovis. It was evident during games and on film. You could tell Slovis had that “it” factor so many prized USC quarterbacks before him have displayed. You know it when you see it. Slovis brings it with him and players around him respond.
Should Slovis get to play this spring, I have little doubt that he’s going to take the next steps and become a more vocal leader. He will be a savage competitor on the field. PFF already sees Slovis as the best quarterback in the Pac-12 and one of the 10 best in the entire nation.
Man, it's going to be impossible for J.T. Daniels to win his job back if Slovis keeps playing like this
Not only is Slovis sitting on a launching pad ready to rocket to stardom, he is surrounded by an extraordinary amount of talent at receiver and running back to help him get there. This upcoming season, whenever it happens, is as much about Slovis taking the next step in his formal football education as it is about competing for titles.
Pac-12 titles are great, but should Slovis fall short yet still take those next major steps in his development, folks will be more than pleased. Great quarterbacking is one of the few things Trojan fans will be happy to watch develop, as long as they really are developing and the process isn’t fool’s gold.
Kedon Slovis is the conductor of his own life and he has been writing his own ballad ever since he came to USC. He’s a magnificent example of what happens to those who put their head down, work hard, and do everything they can to make sure that when their number is called, they are ready to deliver for their teammates and the coaches.
Right now, Slovis may as well be Salome dancing the Dance of the Seven Veils — his feet and arms have carried him to the top of the Pac-12 mountain. All that’s left for him to do is take that next step and deliver his Magnum Opus.
The Trojans are wondering along with everyone else if there’s another opt-out on the horizon.
After USC defensive tackle Jay Tufele made the decision to opt out of college football on Wednesday — essentially making the choice to not risk a winter or spring season if one is played — one has to wonder if other opt-out decisions are coming from high-end Trojan athletes.
At the forefront of the list of potential opt-out candidates is receiver Amon-ra St. Brown. A player who gained over 1,000 receiving yards last year — in an offense with Michael Pittman as a teammate on the other side of the field — has clearly demonstrated the ability to perform as a stand-alone receiver. Pittman did give St. Brown more chances to operate one-on-one, but St. Brown still had to evolve into a strong receiver in his own right and on his own terms. No one could have left the 2019 season thinking St. Brown was merely a beneficiary of having Pittman as a teammate. That certainly helped, but St. Brown set his own high standard.
Given the quality of his 2019 campaign, St. Brown is rightly seen as a receiver who could come close to Pittman’s status, and maybe even exceed it. The idea that St. Brown could be an early second-round pick in the 2021 NFL Draft is hardly ludicrous, at least from this vantage point. USC creates high-level NFL receivers; St. Brown’s ability to rise to the top of the depth chart on the Trojans’ roster is an achievement which speaks for itself.
Jay Tufele made the entirely understandable calculation that his draft stock won’t be significantly hurt by forgoing a college football season. Not playing in winter or spring ensures that he won’t go to the NFL Scouting Combine as a bruised and banged-up prospect. Many other players are currently arriving at that same conclusion.
Amon-ra St. Brown could be next. No one within the USC football family has to like it, but it is a possibility which has to be considered; there’s no getting around that basic point.
The possibility of an added year of eligibility for student-athletes in fall sports is just around the corner, according to new reporting by Nicole Auerbach of the Athletic.
The biggest thing in here is that the athletes will keep that year regardless of whether they end up playing a spring season. It’s a blanket year of eligibility that is going to have long-reaching and unintended consequences. Right now we are seeing some student-athletes opt out and decide to prepare for the NFL Draft, as was the case with USC defensive lineman Jay Tufele.
Source tells @TheAthletic that the D-I Council is recommending to the NCAA Board of Directors that all fall sport athletes keep their year of eligibility, no matter if they play in fall or spring or how many games. Board needs to approve this on Friday.
However, we are also going to see players take advantage of that extra year in a brand new college football world where they can make money off their name, image, and likeness. This will happen while they use the extra year to get ready for the NFL draft. An odd latent function of the new NLI policy is that it may lead to students staying in school and opting to take that extra year because they don’t necessarily need the money right now, the reason being that they would have endorsement deals. Obviously, all this is still to be finalized.
The extra year of eligibility is also going to create a logjam at certain positions, at least for a couple of years, while coaches try to honor the offers they’ve made to underclassmen who still have another year of high school but also have a full scholarship offer from their top school. A perfect example of this is Georgia with former USC blue-chip quarterback J.T. Daniels.
Daniels already has to compete with Jamie Newman and Stetson Bennett, but he also has to compete with the other quarterbacks Georgia will be bringing in who can come in early because of the coronavirus. It’s a perfect blend of chaos: Upperclassmen can’t go anywhere, but early high school graduates can come in and potentially play what would amount to an entire year — early! Players such as Carson Beck and Brock Vandagriff are going to come in and try to keep Daniels from ever seeing the field.
It’s going to be very interesting to watch how this extra year of eligibility unfolds. It’s going to be equally interesting to watch schools do a high-wire balancing act bringing these kids along and still finding room for them all. Yet, recruits don’t go to a school such as USC or Georgia because they are scared of a little competition; they go there because they hope to get that type of competition for a spot. They would like to prevail in a battle for a starting spot, but even if they fall short, they get tested and their skills get developed for a potential shot at the pros down the line.
All you can ask for these days as a recruit is a chance. There are going to be a lot of players trying to find their “chance” in a clogged college football environment, but that does not mean the NCAA did the wrong thing. It did exactly what it should have; now it’s up to the member institutions to make it all work.
One of the big “what-ifs” connected to a possible spring season for USC
No one should be expecting spring football, given the logistical complications involved. It’s an enormous challenge, in light of the simple reality that asking young men to play two football seasons in one year — without giving athletes significant added protections and benefits at the very least — invites all sorts of problems. Add the fact that college sports is desperately trying to save the 2021 college basketball season and the NCAA Tournament and Final Four which will come along with it. Saving the NCAA Tournament is a huge priority for the NCAA. Wedging in spring football under uncertain conditions could take a back seat to basketball, with schools facing the need to make sure football can be played in the fall of 2021.
We have to be realistic about spring football, even though many of us hope football can still be salvaged.
Yet, if we are to look ahead and consider a world with spring football — and what it would look like — one USC football player’s outlook could become a lot brighter.
Trojans Wire staff writer Andy Patton brought you the news in June that receiver Kyle Ford had suffered a torn ACL. This was going to cost him most, if not all, of his 2020 fall season. Ford was probably going to be part of a four-wide receiver set on passing downs. He was initially envisioned as an important depth piece behind Amon-Ra St. Brown, Tyler Vaughns, and Drake London in the USC receiver corps.
Of all the valuable pieces on the 2020 USC roster, Ford emerges as a candidate for resurrection and revival if USC plays a spring 2021 schedule. We shouldn’t expect spring football — it is something to hope for without attaching our emotions to it in these complicated times — but if, somehow, the Pac-12 is able to pull it off and provide a plan which is able to work, Kyle Ford could reclaim a 2020 season in the early months of 2021.
It would be something — not just having football in the spring, but having Kyle Ford on the field for USC.
It’s not likely, but that doesn’t mean the possibility should be completely ignored or buried.
Former Cal and current Penn State athletic director Sandy Barbour comments on what the fall might look like in the Pac-12 and Big Ten.
If you are a USC or Pac-12 football fan wondering what will happen with your team’s athletes this fall — in the absence of actual games on Saturdays — that particular question is being wrestled with by administrators in both the Pac-12 and Big Ten Conferences.
The fact that the Pac-12 and Big Ten have both shut down fall football (with the Big Ten receiving considerable pushback, as we noted on Sunday) means that the two Power Five conferences have to consider what to do with their athletes in the next several months. This is part of a longer and more complicated conversation about separating or integrating athletes with the other members of the general student population on college campuses. This conversation includes the question of whether to allow any students onto campuses at all for the 2020 fall semester, given the concerns about the coronavirus. Administrators are basically working with a Rubik’s Cube, trying to shift all these different components into an alignment which balances every possible consideration.
Schools want to get some students on campus and into a dorm room so that they can collect room and board expenses. They want to be able to offer a full campus experience to justify tuition rates as they currently exist. They want to go as far as they can while still preserving public health and safety, and while operating within the guidelines put forth by their state’s governor and other local health officials. This is an extremely complicated calculus, as one can readily appreciate.
In the Big Ten and Pac-12, the landscape is different from the SEC, Big 12, and ACC, given the decision to shut down fall football. What’s next in the Big Ten and Pac-12?
A particular person spoke about this on Monday. Her statement is less important than the fact that she spoke up in the first place:
PSU AD Sandy Barbour on what will be allowed for Big Ten/Pac-12 football players this fall: "It won't look exactly spring ball-ish but it'll be a hybrid."
The folks in Berkeley might have the best appreciation of the importance of this development.
Sandy Barbour, you might recall, was the athletic director at the University of California before she moved to Penn State. She therefore holds down a Big Ten AD position while having previously worked in the same capacity in the Pac-12 (dating back to the conference’s days as the Pac-10). She therefore represents a crossover figure who can speak not just to the Big Ten’s current reality, but also the Pac-12’s set of circumstances.
Maybe the Big Ten and Pac-12 will propose appreciably different plans or roadmaps for their respective schools’ football players this fall. Yet, one cannot ignore how the Big Ten has charted a course the Pac-12 has seen fit to largely follow. No, the Pac-12 hasn’t operated on autopilot — it has made its own medical consultations and has to live with governors and health officials separate from those in Big Ten states. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that the coronavirus politics of the Pac-12 are reasonably close to the Big Ten, set apart from the SEC-Big 12-ACC triumvirate.
Sandy Barbour might not be the final authority on any potential joint plan the Big Ten and Pac-12 might devise — if such a plan emerges at all — but among the various leaders in collegiate athletics whose words should be taken seriously on the Big Ten’s and Pac-12’s plans for the fall, Barbour would rate higher rather than lower on the list.
This should get USC’s attention, and one would presume it will.
When you were on NFL Films in the early 1980s, that was a big deal.
Trojans Wire staff writer Andy Patton brought you the news over the weekend that Dick Coury, John McKay’s defensive coordinator on the 1967 USC football national championship team, died at age 90.
Andy’s news report chronicles the many stops Coury made in his coaching career, so we’re not going to rehash the many coaching stops he made. The focus of this particular piece is on the moment of his career when he was introduced to a larger national audience.
Ask a football fan over 50 years old who Dick Coury is. Try this with your dad or grandfather if he is an ardent football watcher, pro and college.
If your dad or grandpa is a USC fan, okay, they’ll remember him for what he did on the 1967 national championship team, and also for his tenure as Mater Dei’s head coach before moving to USC. If your dad or grandfather isn’t from Los Angeles, the majority answer is almost certainly going to be that Coury was an assistant to Dick Vermeil on the 1980 NFC champion Philadelphia Eagles, who made the franchise’s first Super Bowl appearance in SB XV against the Oakland Raiders.
If you don’t remember Coury through his Mater Dei or USC identities, chances are you and the older men in your family remember Coury through one moment: Super Bowl XV, and more precisely, the NFL Films half-hour documentary on the game, which it produces after every Super Bowl.
If you are a younger football fan (let’s say under 30 years old), you need to realize that in January of 1981, ESPN was juuuuuuuust starting out as a sports cable network. It had not begun to gain critical mass in the American sports fan’s consciousness. This was still a time when American sports fans listened to baseball on the radio at night and read the newspaper for box scores in the morning or early-afternoon editions of the paper. WFAN in New York — the first all-sports radio station in the United States — was still six years away from coming into existence. Cable television was just getting off the ground. American television news was still the three major networks and little else, with CNN — like ESPN — being in its infancy.
At this time, NFL Films was still riding high as the juggernaut publicity and promotional wing of the NFL. NFL Films was an essential ingredient in the growth of professional football as a commercial and cultural force in America. The work of the Sabols — father Ed and son Steve — created remarkable football cinematography. Sam Spence provided the iconic musical scores. John Facenda — “The Voice of God” — delivered his signature goosebump-producing narration. If you were on NFL Films, you achieved a certain degree of national recognition. People noticed.
If you received the NFL Films treatment at the Super Bowl, that recognition became exponentially larger.
So it was for Dick Coury at Super Bowl XV in 1981.
Even though Coury was just a wide receiver coach for Dick Vermeil on the 1980 Eagles, he figured prominently in the SB XV documentary produced by NFL Films. He appears at several points in this film, and he is even given the honor of a caption, which NFL Films did not regularly do for its Super Bowl films. He appears at 3:50, 6:10, and 19:40 in the video below, with the caption occurring at 3:50:
Within Los Angeles, Dick Coury is known as a Mater Dei legend who then helped USC win a national title.
Everywhere else in the United States — certainly outside the state of California — Dick Coury is known by your father or grandfather as “the Eagles assistant coach NFL Films showed in Super Bowl XV.”
Rest in peace, Dick Coury. Your place in the NFL Films documentary on Super Bowl XV will give you an eternal place in football history and the sports culture of the United States.
What is the biggest test facing USC head football coach Clay Helton in 2021? The question is an obvious one, an important one, and a weighty one. The question invites all sorts of answers, many different windows into how Clay Helton will conduct his business and change — or reaffirm — his identity in front of the USC fan base.
Whether in the spring or fall, Helton will coach USC in 2021. Assuming we are fortunate enough to have college football games next year (the Pac-12 has already given up on that prospect in 2020), what really is the most central challenge facing Helton?
Again, so many possible answers exist, and many of them will be perfectly good ones. Which answer is better than others? It’s actually not as complicated as many people think. A key moment in Helton’s coaching tenure provides the answer.
The most important moment in Helton’s stay at USC — at least in terms of saving his job and making it possible for him to remain employed for more than half a decade at Heritage Hall — was his fateful decision to start Sam Darnold against Utah early in the 2016 season. Yes, the decision revealed how much of a mistake Helton had made by tabbing Max Browne as the Week 1 starter against Alabama a few weeks earlier, but Helton had to acknowledge his mistake instead of stubbornly refusing to do so. Had he stuck with Browne, the 2016 season would have gone nowhere. Helton likely would have been fired; moreover, he would have deserved to be.
By starting Darnold — and by doing so before the season had fully unraveled — Helton barely avoided disaster. Darnold was able to create a 9-3 record, which was good enough to make the Rose Bowl when Pac-12 champion Washington went to the College Football Playoff and the Peach Bowl national semifinal game against Alabama. Darnold was spectacular in a comeback win over Penn State.
Helton had trusted Darnold, a younger player, to perform. He took a chance on an unknown. He bet big. He went bold. His confidence, but also his willingness to make a change and admit a mistake, were both rewarded. That’s the reason Helton had a productive pair of seasons in 2016 and 2017 at USC. That’s why he is still around now.
This is the essential answer to the big question posed above. When we get to 2021 and Helton looks at his roster, will he be willing to play younger players over older ones? Will he display the ability to relentlessly change his player rotations and not cede most snaps to incumbents?
This point will be especially salient if there is no spring football, and the next Pac-12 game for USC occurs in September of 2021. The Trojans — along with every other Pac-12 program — will have played no football for nearly 20 months. In that period of time, incoming recruits will have had time to study Graham Harrell’s offense and Todd Orlando’s defense. Film study will be able to be done in copious quantities. Players will be able to do a lot of textbook learning while also working out and developing their strength.
USC’s 2020 recruiting was mediocre, but its 2021 recruiting was strong. Helton will confront familiar decisions about playing experienced players or younger players with more upside. That isn’t anything new for him or any other college football coach, but what WILL be different is that after 20 months without football, younger players who didn’t get to play in 2020 will have had another year in which to physically develop. None of USC’s players will have endured any physical punishment (not, at least, in live-game action) for nearly two whole years, so they will be very fresh entering a fall 2021 season.
Helton’s ability to use players correctly is his biggest challenge.
See? That wasn’t as mysterious or as complicated as you might have thought.
How are we going to get college football training camp started? How are we going to have an on-ramp to college football in the state of California, which contains four of the Pac-12’s teams (one-third of the league membership)?
Answers to these burning questions were provided — not complete answers, but certainly substantial improvements — by the State of California on Friday afternoon. Jon Wilner of the San Jose Mercury News obtained COVID-19-related health and safety guidelines provided by the state which affect USC and UCLA in Los Angeles County, plus Stanford in Santa Clara County and California in the City of Berkeley.
These guidelines are part of a 34-page health and safety plan for secondary and higher education in the state. The 34-page document contains a more specific 10-page plan for collegiate athletics, starting on page 24.
A short excerpt of the state guidelines obtained by Wilner:
“All decisions about following this guidance should be made in collaboration with local public health officials and other authorities.
“Implementation of this guidance should be tailored for each setting, including adequate consideration of programs operating at each institution and the needs of student-athletes and workers.
“Administrators should engage relevant stakeholders— including student-athletes, their families, staff and labor partners in the school community—to formulate and implement plans.”
One obvious point to make about these guidelines is that while the county and city officials will need to approve them in order for USC, UCLA, Stanford, and Cal to begin training camp in mid-August and then play games starting in late September, there might not have to be 100-percent uniformity among the four schools or with the state guidelines. Some degree of local discretion might enter the picture; how much is the big question, something you are surely wondering about.
That tension between state government and county or city government — an obvious structural complication in California and every other American state or territory in this pandemic — will need to be resolved in a productive way over the next several weeks.
Stay tuned for more news and analysis as events warrant.
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