USC Trojans Catastrophic Loss Signals Trouble For Now And For The Future Of The Program

In a stunning turn of events, the USC Trojans managed to blow a 14-point fourth-quarter lead at the hands of the Maryland Terrapins, a team that was winless in the BIG-10 coming into the contest. We’re beyond the stage to treat this season’s performance as a collection of isolated events, rather, as collective symptoms of this regime’s holistic demise. Here are five reasons why the Trojan Family should be deeply concerned about the future of their beloved football program.  

The USC Trojans Were Lucky Not to Get Blown Out

Lost amidst the noise of Lincoln Riley’s comprehensive ineffectiveness is that the Trojans were lucky last night wasn’t much worse. To leverage a staple of Riley’s logic, USC was three plays from losing the game by 20.

The Terrapins inexplicably had an illegal substitution on the Trojans’ third possession after USC was already off the field from a Michael Lantz missed field goal, and that second life led to a Kyron Hudson back shoulder 22-yard dime from Miller Moss.

Then was the perplexing end-of-half decision by Maryland quarterback Billy Edwards Jr. to run a play where the snap went over his head from the hurried panic, as opposed to simply kicking a field goal with less than 10 seconds to play.

Finally, Edwards Jr’s bizarre pop-up floater pass that was intercepted on 4th & goal from the Trojans 3-yard line, when he had a streaking Tai Felton wide open in his line of sight was another seven points off the board before the Terrapins semi-miraculous comeback.

Make no mistake, the toughest team Maryland played Saturday night…was Maryland. If the Terrapins were even slightly more sensible, USC would have been waxed by three scores. 

Culture of Softness

NCAA Football: Southern California at Maryland
Tommy Gilligan-Imagn Images

Probably the greatest criticism imbued on a team is being called soft. The Trojans aren’t just soft, they’re systemically soft. This is now the fourth consecutive loss where the Trojans wilted away after having a fourth-quarter lead and a chance to close the game out on both sides of the ball, their third consecutive loss on the road (the team is 0-3 overall in pure road games), and the second consecutive game where they wasted a two-touchdown halftime lead.

USC is simply not physically or emotionally ready to grind week-over-week in the BIG-10. For a coach who claimed this would be the Mecca of college football, emphasized the strength and conditioning weight gain in the offseason, and vowed to have a renewed fire after last season’s debacle, Riley seems to have simply rinsed and repeated his vanilla philosophy over the past eight years.

You can be called boring, unimaginative, or inexplosive in this conference… the only thing you can’t afford to get called is soft. This might be the conference’s softest team in 2024.

Program In Stagnation

NCAA Football: Southern California at Maryland
Tommy Gilligan-Imagn Images

With this loss, it’s qualitatively and quantitatively evident the Trojans are simply stuck in neutral. Riley is 5-9 over his last 14 games and 11-11 in his past 22 contests. Furthermore, as discussed last week, the Trojans have now gone from 5th in the country last year in yards per play gained at 7.1, to 27th nationally this year at 6.1 yards per play.

On the flip side, 2023 saw the Trojans give up 5.9 yards per play for a historically bad 93rd in the country, to just 5.8 yards per play allowed this year, coming in at 85th in the country. A decidedly less explosive offense, combined with an ever so slight positive defensive nudge results in a team that’s evidently worse than last year.   

When one overlays those results with our analysis last week on 12 of the 16 unique coach-team combinations since 2000 to win the national title within four years, it makes the Maryland loss all the more alarming.

Additionally, just look around the country and see what’s happening – Curt Cignetti is 7-0 in year one at Indiana, Kalen DeBoer took Washington to the national title game last season in year two, Steve Sarkisian propelled Texas to the 4-team college football playoff in year three, while Dan Lanning springboarded Oregon to the #1 ranking in year three. The transfer portal is an accelerant to a quick turnaround, not a detriment. If you know what you’re doing, transformational change can happen quickly.

Yet another wasted opportunity is also what’s piercingly painful for USC fans. By the end of October, you realize how good teams are given large enough bodies of work. Now, armed with that insight, the conclusion is the 2024 Trojans had a very easy schedule — only three ranked opponents on the slate, none of which were purely on the road (two at home versus Penn State and Notre Dame, one neutral site against LSU).

All the Trojans had to do was win against their mediocre competition and go 1-2 in the ranked games to punch their ticket into the 12-team playoff. Not only did they fail on such a modest task, but they might not even make a bowl game.

Lack of Player Development

Syndication: Detroit Free Press
Junfu Han / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

For how well Miller Moss reads defenses, makes crisp throws when clicking, and finds seemingly minuscule crevasses in defenses, the Trojan leader doesn’t look like the same player who took the field against LSU. His mechanics have gotten sloppier, his footwork has gotten lazier and his decision-making has gotten more questionable, given the five consecutive games with a pick, most of which have been game-defining in the four defeats.

The majority of Moss’ struggles fall on Riley, who is famed as the ultimate quarterback whisperer and has yet to find ways for Moss to overcome the Trojans offensive line challenges. How can someone with Moss’ robust potential methodically regress under the tutelage of the $10M per year offensive genius?

And make no mistake, this is a Riley problem, not a Moss one. The reason is we’re seeing the same lack of player development across the talented wide receiver trio of Ja’Kobi Lane, Zachariah Branch, and Duce Robinson.

Close your eyes and Lane, whose spectacular one-handed 15-yard touchdown catch had SportsCenter buzzing, looks eerily similar to Dwayne Jarrett, a player who rose to Trojan stardom by game four of his freshman year. Blink on that Robinson fourth-quarter 26-yard touchdown grab and you see Drake London’s freight train score against UCLA in the Covid Victory Bell game. Flinch and Branch resembles a hybrid of Reggie Bush and Adoree Jackson.

None of those prodigious talents have made the requisite jump to stardom like their predecessors. That’s a function of and an indictment on coaching. The Trojans’ most consistent offensive weapon, Woody Marks, is a senior transfer already refined at South Carolina. 

The USC Trojans Fairness & Finances

NCAA Football: USC Trojans at Arizona State
Matt Kartozian-Imagn Images

The comparisons flying around faster than electrons at the speed of light are Clay Helton versus Riley through 34 games of their respective Trojan tenures. The former was 25-9 with a Rose Bowl victory and a PAC-12 championship, while the latter is 22-12 with no major bowl victories or conference championships.

But the even more glaring head-to-head is Lane Kiffin versus Riley. Kiffin inherited a zombie program on scholarship reductions, NCAA sanctions, and multi-year bowl bans, while still going 28-15. That was deemed not good enough to even get a ride from the airport. Riley, with all his promises and bravado, would need to go 6-3 over his next nine games (his exact current winning percentage at USC), to just match the tarmacked Kiffin.

Of course, the subtext is Riley has his days numbered. Barring an absolute collapse over the next five games, I’ve always suggested 2025 as his defining season. The elephant-in-the-room challenge with executing a potential Riley exit is the $70M+ remaining on his contract. How USC can potentially buy out Riley’s contract, pay another staff, catch up in NIL, and complete fundraising for the new football center project, is just about financially impossible. Particularly with an aging booster base of waning enthusiasm from not being a true contender since 2008. 

That leaves the Trojans in a purgatory-like scenario – being handcuffed with the wrong person to lead this program for a few more years until they can afford to move on. Catastrophic indeed.       

Mentioned In This Article: