Musings from Arledge: First Game Optimism
Musings hasn’t always been the home of optimism. But as the Stallion once put it, if I can change, and if you can change, everybody can change. And it’s nice to be optimistic about USC football. It’s morning again in Troy.
Now, that was just one game, and it was just Rice. Let’s not go crazy. But, still, it felt different than the mental abuse we’ve been subjected to for so many years. It’s like we’ve been watching an average high school garage band every week for a very long time and then, all of a sudden, we’re sitting in Abbey Road Studios with the Beatles. Sure, they’re only warming up, maybe jamming on some of the Little Richard numbers they loved growing up; they haven’t started recording Hey Jude just yet. But still you can already tell this is something very different than what we’ve become accustomed to. And it’s refreshing.
Saturday was good. It wasn’t all good, but let’s start with the good.
Caleb Williams is good. Really good. He’s a leader, runs like a wideout, has a rocket arm. He’s accurate. He’s what USC fans hoped he would be. Obviously, the great quarterbacks establish their greatness by overcoming adversity, and Rice’s defense wasn’t going to create much of that. Truth be told, not many defenses on USC’s schedule will. Utah is good but not great defensively, but they will be a handful at home. Notre Dame is good defensively. Much of the rest of the schedule will provide very little resistance to Caleb and crew; they’re just too good. So, I concede, to be great, Caleb will have to overcome adversity when it finally hits. But for now, let’s just enjoy the fact that Williams has every tool you would ever want from a quarterback. It’s like you created your own player on Madden and gave him 99’s across the board.
And, of yeah, remember last year when USC’s offense looked slow? It didn’t take long for Lincoln Riley to fix that. Caleb Williams, Jordan Addison, Mario Williams, Raleek Brown — these guys can fly. And Tajh Washington, who didn’t pop in Graham Harrell’s Tecmo Bowl offense, looked dangerous, too. And I know Gary Bryant, who didn’t do a ton in the opener, is a threat with his speed. Suddenly USC looks like a school that recruits skill position talent at a high level again. Opposing defenses have a problem, because this USC roster can hit a big play at any time with a lot of different players, and Lincoln Riley will get them in space.
And I haven’t even mentioned the two new backs, who aren’t burners but are very experienced and very good. This offense is going to light people up almost every week.
It’s going to need to. That’s the bad. Now, look, I’m not going to beat up on the defense too much. Those guys did outscore the opposing offense 21-14. Forcing turnovers is a big part of the game, and those guys deserve credit for making those big plays. But let’s also be honest: while the USC front seven has some players, it is not a dominant group. Nobody is going to watch that film and think they’re playing 2021 Georgia or 2008 USC. Rice was making room for its backs far too easily.
The Trojans are going to win a lot of games this year. But they’re not going to do it shutting down the other team’s offense. Lincoln Riley has what will probably be a top-three offense, a group that will look a lot like the offenses he took to the playoffs at Oklahoma. This defense can’t be dominant, because it doesn’t yet have the horses. And I’m not sure it has to be. (Well, if you wanted to win the playoff it would need to be. But I’m not drinking that Kool-Aid.) What it needs to be is opportunistic. This is a defense that is going to take risks. They’re going to shift the front just before the snap. They’re going to slant. They’re going to stunt. They’re going to blitz. They have to. They can’t sit in a base defense and rely on superior talent to overwhelm the opponent. This isn’t Rey, Clay, Brian, and Sed.
This means that the defense is going to get caught in bad situations sometimes. It’s going to give up points and yards. Because they’ll be playing a high-risk style, they will give up some big plays, probably a lot of them, probably at least once every week.
And, while I don’t love that, it’s going to be okay. They’re going to play defense the way Chip Kelly’s Oregon teams played defense. That’s not exactly something to aspire to, but it can work. They are going to gamble a lot, trying to hit on a big play. Because when you have an offense like USC’s (or Chip’s back in the day), you can afford to gamble. Your great offense can match the score you gave up when you got burned for blitzing. And, with a great offense, you may only need two big defensive plays in the first half to put a game out of reach. So go all in chasing after those two big plays.
You saw this against Rice. Rice was moving the ball. It was having success. But USC was scoring at will. The Trojans force a punt on the second series, get a pick six, and the game is effectively over. Explosive, efficient offenses put immense pressure on opposing defenses. You feel like you need a touchdown on every possession. And sometimes you do.
One other thing. USC’s weakness this year will be stopping the run. That’s a concern for next week. It’s a concern against UCLA and Oregon State. It’s a concern, especially, against Utah and Notre Dame. Will the defense be good enough to beat those two teams? I don’t know.
But keep in mind that ball-control teams trade explosiveness for reliability and consistency. Running off tackle half the time means you’re running a lot of plays that are not designed to give you 50-yard gains. If you’re the opponent and USC is scoring on most every possession, when you get stopped on first down, it becomes increasingly difficult to justify running the ball on 2nd and 10, because you don’t want to get in a long-yardage situation — playing behind the sticks is a lot easier if you have Caleb Williams, Mario Williams, and Jordan Addison than if you play a Woody Hayes “three yards and a cloud of dust” style of football — and you definitely don’t want to punt. Against USC’s offense, punting is not winning.
And this defense does have some playmakers who can make you pay. USC will face one, two, maybe ten offenses better than Rice. That defensive front will need to play better than it did in the first half the other day. Fortunately, it has a great offense to help as it tries to become a legitimate unit.
A great offense isn’t everything. You still need stops. But a great offense is a questionable defense’s best friend. You don’t necessarily need Sandy Koufax on the mound if you score seven runs in the top of the first.
Bottom line: I thought before the season that USC went from 4-8 to a legitimate threat to win the conference this offseason. I thought USC was likely a ten-win team. It’s only one game, but I saw nothing this week to make me doubt any of that.
Dan Lanning just had the worst trip to Georgia since Ned Beatty went canoeing. And like Ned’s, Dan’s trip was filmed for our entertainment.
And I almost missed it. I was in London. I spent 15 minutes struggling with my iPad, trying to figure out how to change my cable provider information to log in and watch the game on the ESPN app. I almost quit. But, heroically, like the Winston Churchill of Oregon hate, I refused to surrender, no matter the odds. And let me just say, perseverance really does pay off, kids. Because that was glorious.
Some people believe it’s wrong to gloat when your enemy is down. If that’s you, you might want to look the other way for a few minutes.
As you know, Dan Lanning took the Oregon job when yet another coach left Oregon for a better football program. Lanning did three things when he got the job. First, he assembled the best staff of young, used car salesman in the country, a whole crew of guys who may not be able to coach but have been trained since birth to trick high school kids into thinking they can. That’s not entirely a criticism. Lanning got it. He recognized right away that Oregon was all flash and no substance. And if you have a crappy product to sell, you better hire some really good salesman. He has. Every program has as guy or two like that. Oregon has about a dozen. Lanning collects great recruiters who can’t coach the way sailors collect venereal diseases: by paying people most everybody else knows you shouldn’t touch. And now, because they didn’t really have a choice, the Ducks have officially unveiled — on national television, no less — the true nature of the product they’re selling. It was my favorite public unveiling since Geraldo opened Al Capone’s vault and it looked just like Oregon’s trophy case. You’re probably not going to like that Yelp review, Coach Lanning.
Second, Lanning went out and got a transfer QB to build his offense around, Bo Nix of Auburn. Now, I think we can all agree that Bo didn’t have the Oregon debut he had hoped. But maybe you’re wondering: was Bo Nix spectacular at Auburn and simply had an off day this weekend? Nope. Bo knows ducks, and he knew how to throw them long before he became one. And there’s plenty more where that came from. This weekend may not have been Bo’s finest hour, but it wasn’t an unusual hour either. It was just an hour between noon and 8 pm on a Saturday afternoon, and Bo was being Bo. Bo Nix’s primary qualification at Auburn was having a famous dad who played quarterback at Auburn. Auburn making Bo Nix the foundation of its program was like locking up Hunter Biden to sit on your board of directors — you do it because the old man wants you to.
Auburn didn’t think keeping dad happy was worth it anymore. So the college football Don Junior has been handed the keys to Oregon’s offense instead. Now, I don’t want to gush, Dan. People will get the wrong idea. They’ll think I’m showing favoritism here just because you’re a fellow William Jewell Cardinal. But thank you for giving the ball to Bo. That was a brave thing you did. And there are millions of us, all over the country, who really do appreciate it.
The third thing Dan Lanning did is start telling the whole world how Oregon is the SEC of the West. That was their talking point. They said it over and over. Nobody knew that the SEC of the west Coach Dan Frankenstein was creating was an unholy combination of Vanderbilt football and Mississippi State academics. It’s alive! I just hope this new SEC of the West doesn’t have to play the SEC West. I don’t know how much more Oregon versus the SEC we can watch. Even Hannibal Lecter would be queasy after seeing that much blood.
Quick tip to any high school recruit who is trying to figure out whether to buy that car from Tosh and Crew: you might just want to check the Carfax on that one. I’m told it’s already been in a really big wreck.
Of course, it’s hard, as a USC fan, to watch what happened this weekend to Oregon and not remember Clay’s debut against Alabama. The similarities are eerie: opening game, national audience, a battle in an NFL stadium in the south against a traditional SEC power. And a 46-point beat down which exposes your program for what it really is: a pretender. But, hey, Dan, maybe you’ll bounce back like Clay did and find yourself in the Rose Bowl. You only need Bo Nix to turn into Sam Darnold. Let’s see if Uncle Phil can buy one of those on short notice.
Oh, and for those keeping score — I am! — in its last five games, Oregon has four blowout losses and __ uniform combinations. Quack, quack.
But it wasn’t all ugliness in Georgia this weekend. We also saw the debut of a new Georgian, Clay Aiken Helton, whose Georgia Southern squad warriored their way to a win over lower division foe, Morgan State.
Now I don’t want to get too far out in front of this thing, because I realize it’s only one game. But it’s hard not to feel excited about Georgia Southern football. You can just tell when you watch them — which nobody can, because their games aren’t televised — that that’s a team led by someone who is related to someone who once coached offensive linemen. It just jumps out at you.
Now I know what some of you are saying. Wasn’t Clay embarrassingly bad at his last stop? Sure. About as bad as you can be at a job without getting arrested for criminal negligence. But Pete Carroll, Nick Saban, Kim Kardashian — all of them had to overcome embarrassing starts to their careers before achieving super stardom. So Clay is in fine company.
But, Chris, doesn’t Clay still have that really dumb look on his face on the sideline? Yes, but so what? Lou Holtz didn’t have to get rid of his lisp to win a national title. Frank Beamer didn’t have to get that thing removed from his neck before he became successful. Look at Willem Defoe. That dude looks super weird and he’s been doing alright for years. Stop being so shallow, people. You actually have to read the book. Don’t judge Clay by his hillbilly-looking cover.
But Chris, you say, it’s only one game, and didn’t Clay only beat some school named Morgan. Morgan Fairchild University, perhaps? Isn’t she old, and small? That doesn’t sound impressive. Yes. But you’re missing the point. Clay gets it now. You can’t change your partner. Too many people get married thinking they can and realize the truth much too late. After spending years trying to change USC, trying to turn USC into a football program nobody has ever heard of, Clay Helton has simply gone to the kind of place he never should have left. Country roads, took him home, to the place, he belongs. Coaching against teams nobody has ever heard of in places nobody wants to go. He’s picking on guys his own size now, and he’s starting to hit his stride. It’s bachelor season, and Clay is on the hunt for a new love of his life. He’s watching film, showing situational mastery, giving out game balls to all the bosses, he’s hanging out where there are some people who listen to the things he says and actually think they might be true. He’s honoring the late, great Olivia Newton John by telling everybody who will listen that his teams are gonna get physical, physical.
He’s living the dream. Here’s to you, Clay. As we all know, you made Musings, sir. It never would have started, survived, or been read without you. Congrats on the win. I really can’t describe just how thrilled I am that you’re there.
The Musings Meteor Game of the Week
Some explanation may be in order. A Meteor Game (TM) is a game where if a meteor absolutely, positively had to hit the earth — and I’m not saying I want that to happen; it would obviously be terrible — but if it had to happen, a meteor game is where you’d want that meteor to hit. Or, if you prefer, you could call a Bubonic Plague Outbreak Game (but that’s too long) or a Chernobyl Game (if we weren’t all currently wishing the best for the people of Ukraine).
By way of example, the ultimate Meteor Game might be Penn State when Jerry Sandusky was still defensive coordinator against Notre Dame if the two programs were honoring the Nazi-Soviet pact by hosting high-level dignitaries from those countries. That would be a Hall of Fame Meteor Game, easily four meteors out of four on the meteor scale.
Meteor Games almost always involve major powers or rivals, because why would you violently hate a program that sucks? Vanderbilt never plays in a Meteor Game. But you don’t have to be a blue blood. Oregon against UCLA always scores high on the Meteor Scale, even though both programs have been certified disaster areas by FEMA.
The highest-scoring Meteor Game of opening week was Notre Dame against Ohio State, an assertion that really should require no justification, and therefore I will offer none.
This weeks’ Meteor Game: Alabama at Texas, with a rating of three meteors out of four. Alabama always scores high on the meteor scale these days, and Texas undoubtedly deserves its share of fire and brimstone. But this game isn’t what it could have been, because Texas has been awful for a decade now, and with Sark at the helm, they will continue to be a well-lubricated group of talented, undisciplined, underachievers. So if a meteor hits, it need not be a dinosaur-extinction level event. A small one will do.
Chop down the Tree.
