Musings from Arledge: It's almost over

Can somebody please make it stop?

If this were a fight, the corner would have thrown in the towel long ago. It’s not just that USC is struggling. Struggling is one thing. But right now, USC football games are almost unwatchable. Yes, I agree, “almost unwatchable” is a generous assessment. Based on the attendance at the Coliseum, it appears most of the fan base has already moved from “almost unwatchable” to “I refuse to watch this at all.” This poses a particular problem for me: is it possible to write a column that isn’t unreadable when the team you’re writing about is unwatchable? I don’t know. We’re about to find out. 

And since I’m in self-pity mode, imagine being a Broadway critic who is asked to go to the same show every Saturday night and write a review every weekend. That’s me. These games are all the same. The problems are all the same. The frustrations are all the same. 

I know a writer who sometimes writes restaurant reviews for online travel guides. The dirty little secret of that business is that sometimes she doesn’t even attend the restaurant before writing the review. I’m thinking I may try that. I may write my review of the USC-UCLA game before it happens, just to see if I can nail it. 

Do you sometimes shake your head in bewilderment listening to the TV announcers? The announcers for the ASU game were discussing Donte Williams’s desire to become USC’s permanent head coach. That wasn’t strange. I’m sure Donte would love to get the gig. But one of them actually said Donte was making a strong case for it. Strong case? The only strong case he’s making is for the Peter Principle. 

But don’t get me wrong: Donte inherited a tough situation. He didn’t create this grease fire. The arsonist, I believe, is some guy last spotted in the southern part of Georgia, where he is bringing his own special brand of down-home, idiotic happy talk, daft promises, and bitter tears to a new fan base. (The only one who could ever reach me, was the son of an O-line coach….) No reasonable person could expect Donte to turn around a program that had been run by the conference’s worst head coach for far too many years. 

But to make a strong case for getting the job permanently, wouldn’t you expect Donte to have fixed something – you know, at least one substantial problem? Because it appears that nothing has improved. If anything, the grease fire is raging hotter and stronger than ever. Almost every unit on both sides of the ball is in full meltdown mode. If I hadn’t talked to eyewitnesses, I would find it hard to believe that this team even practices regularly. This mess is not Donte’s fault. But he’s in completely over his head and doesn’t have a clue what to do about it. He’s not making a case for the head job. He’s making a case for hiring an experienced head coach. 

To those who were curious what Graham Harrell’s offense would look like without Drake London, congrats. You now know. It looks like 4.9 yards per pass attempt, 3.4 yards per rush attempt, and a single touchdown against a team that had been giving up touchdowns in bunches – and that single TD came about only because the officials called a facemask penalty away from the ball on a third-down play where USC had been stopped. 

To be fair to Graham Harrell – and you know how important that is to me – the guy has only four plays in the playbook, and that means he relies heavily on the only one that has shown any consistent success: throwing 50-50 balls to a tall, uber-talented wideout. That’s a tough strategy to pull off with Michael Pittman in the NFL and Drake London in a cast. 

For Harrell, of course, it’s all about execution. For Harrell, everything is about execution. If you’ve never seen it before, watch this segment where Graham Harrell and Urban Meyer talk about offense. Meyer talks about how his spread system is based on leverage – running and throwing into favorable situations based on what the defense is giving. You read the defense and take advantage of its weaknesses.

Harrell’s system, by contrast, isn’t based on reading much of anything. It’s based on executing so well that you can just do whatever you want, whenever you want, no matter what the defense is doing; you can even throw into coverage that Meyer and Leinart both agree you should never throw into. Or, to pick another example, you can continue to throw into eight-man zone defenses if you want. The nice thing for Harrell is this means failure is never the coach’s fault. If a play fails, the quarterback just didn’t make a perfect-enough throw into a tiny little window. 

It’s really tough to figure out which side of the debate to take in this dispute, isn’t it?

When I was in college, once a week, the offensive and defensive linemen would have a quick 7-on-7 competition against each other. It was hilarious watching those big guys run routes and play man coverage. But my coaches never had the guts to try that in a game. 

Todd Orlando has those guts. And I couldn’t help but remember those hilarious Fat Man 7-on-7 matchups as I watched Drake Jackson try to cover a running back streaking up the sideline. We should be able to agree that in this era of USC football, it takes a truly special effort for a coach to stand out for coaching malpractice. But Orlando has done it. Just watch Drake Jackson – one of the elite pass-rushing recruits in the nation a few years ago – run around lost in the secondary trying to impersonate a Thorpe Award candidate. Granted, nobody else seems able to cover anybody, but still, it’s hard to imagine that Drake Jackson is the answer to that problem. And it’s not like USC is chock full of pass rushers. It’s remarkable. 

It’s not at all clear what Todd Orlando is trying to accomplish, unless he’s hoping to pull off a dead ringer of a Monte Kiffin impression with Drake Jackson playing the part of Devon Kennard. But whatever his plan is, it’s not working. Drake Jackson is a defensive lineman. He is not a linebacker. He’s not athletic enough to play in space. He is athletic enough to be a force on the defensive line. Orlando has taken one of the top pass-rushing recruits in college football, made him get too small to be as effective as he should be on the D line, and has him trying to run with running backs in pass routes. It’s the Cadillac of coaching malpractice. Jackson should be 285 pounds, with a hand in the grass, rushing the passer. 

Drake Jackson’s role is just one example of USC coaches not properly developing and using their talent. USC has failed to develop its players for years now. But it’s also the case that USC simply isn’t as talented as we’d like to believe. Most position groups don’t have a single major NFL prospect. Some of them don’t have a guy who looks like he could develop into an all-conference player. This is not a USC roster. The next coach will have to raid the transfer portal and land a couple of stellar recruiting classes for USC to have better players than Oregon, much less be in the same class as Alabama and Ohio State. We’ll need patience.

We’ve covered that before. I have a different gripe. It’s not popular to call out the players, and for good reason. It’s not their fault that their coaches have been awful. And It’s not their fault that they don’t have the talent of Pete Carroll’s teams. But I do have one complaint: some of these guys look disinterested. If you’re going to get embarrassed on most Saturdays, and this team is going to, you might as well run around and knock some people on their butts.

Kana’i Mauga is doing that. Mauga is not going to make anybody forget about Rey Maualuga; he just doesn’t have that kind of athletic ability. But he is willing to put a hat on somebody and drive them into the ground when he gets a chance. I’d sure like to see more of that. Too many of USC’s current players are content to let opponents beat on them without a response. Would Troy Polamalu allow ASU, Oregon State, Stanford and the like run the ball down his team’s throat without knocking somebody into next week? Would Junior Seau? Scott Ross? 

That’s a culture problem, and the next USC coach will have to fix a serious culture problem in this program. Again, the fan base is going to need patience. 

Even Jaxson Dart, the future of USC football, is going to take time to develop. Right now, he’s a raw kid with size, athleticism, and natural leadership ability who simply isn’t accurate enough as a passer and needs the game to slow down. He’ll be great eventually – if he gets the right coaching – but he’s not great now, and he won’t be in the next three games. It may not be a popular opinion, but it’s not clear to me that he’s a better bet to beat UCLA than Kedon Slovis. Slovis is not who we thought he would be, for whatever reason. But he’s a more accurate passer than Dart right now, and I’m not sure I would put the kid on the bench just yet. I think I’d stick with the platoon system for a bit longer.

It’s almost time to get out the scaffolding and hire the work crew. But before we can watch the restoration project take shape, we’re going to have to take our lumps. We can’t cancel the next three games, so I suppose we’ll watch them. Keep the air-sickness bag handy. Cal is lousy, so that should be a really close football game. UCLA will not be a close game. The Bruins are going to run for 400 yards against this defense. Trust me; just hide the women and children. BYU will drop eight, put three big bodies on USC’s five linemen and win the 3-on-5 battle most of the time, and USC will struggle to move the ball. The Trojans will finish 4-8 or 5-7. You don’t need Nostradamus or Jeremiah to predict this stuff. We can all see what’s coming. 

But it’s almost over. Just three more games.

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You know what has been pretty good? The kicking game. Parker Lewis and Ben Griffiths have done their jobs very well. When you can’t convert in the red zone and you have to punt all the time, having a quality punter and placekicker is important. Griffiths also gets cool points for being an Aussie – that’s cool, right? – and Parker Lewis is (I’m guessing) named after a mediocre 90’s sitcom. So there’s that. Parker Lewis can’t lose, hey? Well, this one can, but it’s not his fault. He’s doing his job.

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When did teams start giving the same number to multiple players? And why? Is this a recruiting thing? Certain numbers are popular with players, so giving two players number 1 is better than only giving one player number 1? 

I’m getting old, and I’m very grumpy these days. But I hate this practice. It complicates things on special teams far too much. Not just players switching jerseys so the guys sharing the same number can be on the field at the same time. But it complicates things for the announcers and the fans. You can’t always know which number 1 you’re watching.

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Matt Campbell, one of my favorites for the USC position, just smacked Sark Saturday. Iowa State should not be able to blow out Texas. The talent gap should be too big. But Campbell is an excellent coach, a great spotter and developer of talent, and Sark is Sark. 

The Texas AD is going to regret that Sark hire, of course, as just about any USC fan knew immediately. I guess he was impressed that Sark could score lots of points at Alabama with four first-round draft choices at WR, five monsters up front, and an NFL starter at QB. Yes, sounds like an impossible task. How did he ever manage?

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What I would give to see USC play defense the way Georgia is playing defense this year….

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It’s Cal week. Coincidentally, I spent the last two weeks in Berkeley, just a couple of blocks from the Cal campus, because I was trying a case in nearby Oakland. What an odd place. Not a bad place, necessarily. There was a lot of good and a lot of bad packed into a very small area. It was lively, and I liked some of the local restaurants. I also saw a shockingly large number of clearly insane homeless people screaming at the tops of their lungs. I would see at least one or two every day, sometimes more, sometimes in groups. There seems to be a never-ending supply of very vocal and very disturbed homeless people on the streets of Berkeley. It must be an interesting place to bring out-of-state recruits.