USC’s defense is the point of focus for every Trojan fan entering the second game of the season. It is also a topic Notre Dame fans are definitely interested in, six weeks before the big one in South Bend on October 14.
Trojans Wire editor Matt Zemek spoke to Nick Shepkowski of Fighting Irish Wire about the USC defense, and why it’s not too early to panic:
“If there is a case to be made for thinking the USC defense will be fine, it is this: The coaching staff reasonably treated San Jose State as a preseason game. The results were less important than testing players in various situations. This complicated first-game approach with multiple roles for various players — which runs counter to conventional wisdom (start the season with simplicity, then build more nuances in the game plans as the season moves along) — might have been used for the primary purpose of getting lots of evaluations of players on film. This serves multiple needs: Coaches can teach more players better, but they can also gather more information on where players fit best. Putting a lot of players through a trial run lent itself to confusion, failure, and inconsistency, but it could be that the coaching staff wanted this so that they could have a better roadmap for the next several weeks.”
Check out our Pac-12 football predictions roundtable for the 2023 season.