Musings from Arledge: Utterly Ineffectual and making peace

I’ll admit, I was skeptical when Heritage Hall announced that Monte Kiffin would lead the team out of the tunnel and then stick around to coordinate the defense. But I guess it turned out okay. The defensive performance distracted viewers from gawking at what has happened to Kedon Slovis: from freshman phenom, all-conference QB, and even potential Heisman candidate to lost and utterly ineffectual. It’s been quite a fall.

Indeed, “Utterly Ineffectual” might be a good slogan for the 2021 USC football team. For the second consecutive home game, the Trojans got absolutely wrecked by a middling team. And there was nothing flukish about it. Oregon State is just better – much, much better than USC. The Trojans got physically abused like they were playing their mean older brother. USC was Robin Williams going up against Dr. Death in The Best of Times.

We all need to make peace with a couple of things after last night’s performance. First, this USC team is bad. The team was coming off a humiliating performance in their last home game. They were playing the conference’s traditional doormat, and while the Beavers have improved, they are still the team that lost to Purdue only a few weeks ago. Oregon State almost never signs a player that USC wanted. It competes for players with teams like San Jose State. This is a game that USC should have been highly motivated to win, and it’s a game the Trojans should have had the talent to win. 

Yet those lightly regarded players from Oregon State walked into the Coliseum and not only won there for the first time since the Eisenhower administration – before most of their parents were born – but did it by physically mauling USC to the tune of 322 rushing yards (and don’t forget 213 passing). 

This USC defense was supposed to be much improved. It’s a mess. USC is giving up 27 points a game despite not having played a single good team yet. And that stat could be worse. What if Wazzu had not lost their quarterback in the first half last week? USC was a goal-line stand from being down 21-0 to a terrible Washington State team. The Cougars would have scored more points had they not been playing a walk-on quarterback with no experience and even less talent. 

The remarkable thing about the current USC team isn’t that it has holes. We all knew that going into the season. I wrote in a pre-season Musings that I didn’t see how you could be a great team if you can’t run the ball or stop the run, and I was pretty sure USC would struggle with both. That they are struggling in both areas is not a surprise. 

What is a surprise is that they are struggling everywhere, even where we thought this team would be solid. I thought USC would be excellent at quarterback. They are not. (They may become excellent when Dart returns and gets more game reps.) I thought the secondary would be excellent. It is a disaster. I thought the edge rushers would wreak havoc. They have been easily controlled every week. I was sure the receivers would dominate. They have not. Drake London is obviously a handful, but even London has been dropping too many passes, and at this point, with the exception of one half against Wazzu, teams have been able to deal with the USC wideouts.

This team is a mess. I thought this was an eight-win team. Now I’m not sure it can avoid a losing record, even playing a pillow-soft schedule. You can make a pretty strong argument that it’s one of the three or four worst teams in the conference right now. I shudder to think what Notre Dame and UCLA will do. I’m scared to think of what crappy Colorado and Utah might do. 

This brings us to the second fact with which we need to make peace: it’s going to take some time to fix this mess, and there is no guarantee that it will happen. The USC program has suffered from terrible leadership for the better part of a decade now, and Clay Helton was allowed to exercise his incompetent nice guy act for far too many years. 

There’s a downside to leaving an inept leader in place year after year even after the entire world knows he’s not up to the job. And we’re seeing the consequences of it now. The rot in this program runs deep. There are giant holes in the roster, and, maybe worse – because in the days of the transfer portal, holes can be patched quickly – there is a huge culture problem in this program. For far too long, there has been a lack of accountability, a lack of discipline, and I suspect, a lack of hard work. USC is now a moderately talented team (above average talent but far from spectacular) that is mentally and physically soft. And if that sounds too harsh, just remember that USC allowed itself to be physically manhandled on the Coliseum turf by a bottom-feeder program that hasn’t won in LA since before the Berlin Wall was built. 

If this USC team has any heart, this would be a good time to put out the search team to locate it, because it didn’t make an appearance last night. Or if the Trojans simply aren’t interested in playing football, they should issue a press release pronto. There are hundreds of thousands of USC football fans who undoubtedly have other things they could be doing on a Saturday night.  

We’ll talk here in future weeks about USC’s coaching search, since it appears there won’t be much else of an optimistic note to talk about the rest of this season. But let’s get one thing clear: whatever we think about offensive-minded coaches versus defensive-minded coaches, or successful coordinators versus head coaches at smaller programs, or all of the other issues that we’ll be debating for the next few months, the next head coach at USC must be able to rebuild a winning culture.

It’s hard to win football games. It takes sacrifice. You have to be willing to work your tail off all off-season, giving a great effort in the weight room even when you feel like garbage, running those extra sprints at full speed when your lungs are on fire. It requires you to sacrifice your time and energy to focus on your technique every practice, to study film, to know the game plan and really understand your assignments. It requires you to sacrifice some of what you want for yourself – more catches, more carries, a bigger role – for the team’s benefit. Football is a violent, unforgiving sport. It is hard. It hurts. 

Every college football team works hard, just because football is, by definition, hard. But championship teams put in a different level of effort and they do it with a higher level of attention to detail. USC hasn’t put in that effort, hasn’t had that attention to detail, in years, because Clay Helton and his predecessors didn’t demand it. Clay says he loved his players, and he probably did, but it wasn’t tough love, and he didn’t hold them accountable. The product USC has been putting on the field for some years has been unacceptable. The product USC put on the Coliseum turf the last couple of home games has been embarrassing. Yet I wonder how embarrassed a lot of those players and coaches are. I wonder if they haven’t made peace with it already. I wonder if they haven’t become comfortable with blowing assignments, committing stupid penalties, wanting it a little less than the other team and still expecting to be called warriors in the post-game press conference. There might be some warriors in this USC program, but if so, they are few and far between. 

USC’s next coach better have a vision for what he wants his program to be. He better be able to explain that vision. And he better hold all of his coaches and players accountable for the effort with which they give in fulfilling that vision. To succeed, I suspect he will have to empty his roster of a lot of nice kids who aren’t really committed to winning football, and it’s probably going to take a couple of years. I encourage my fellow USC fans to be patient, because whoever takes over this program, there will be no quick fix. Putting out some grease fires takes a lot of effort and a lot of time.