The USC Trojans have done it … but what they did was not good at all. The Trojan Men squandered a golden opportunity to have an unbeaten regular season and a Pac-12 title. They played their most prone and wrong game of the season. The Trojans blew game after game, opportunity after opportunity, sequence after sequence. On Friday night they made one mental mistake after another. It’s as if nothing changes throughout the year. On Friday night, against Oregon, there wasn’t much of a game in the Pac-12 Championship, so instead of the usual “tacos and fouls,” we have to be honest and take into account the many fouls of this loss.
Let’s see where it all went wrong.
Friends
Clay Helton
He had a chance to do something remarkable; instead, Clay Helton coached his team as he did every two weeks, that is, at a mediocre level. The Trojans looked as poor as almost every two weeks, except for the second half against Utah and the first half against Washington State. The team seemed mentally inadequate. The Trojans constantly got in their way. They committed penalty after penalty without considering that the players were hurting their teammates in the process. When the head coach of that team had a chance to prepare his roster for a conference title and a New Year’s Six bowl, he oversaw one of the poorest outings of the season. It’s a shame that USC probably won’t learn from this game or this season, instead using the fact that it has fallen short (just a score) to justify the continued ignorance of glaring mistakes.
Kedon Slovis
The USC quarterback has played well in previous quarters this season, but overall has not played particularly well this year. The reason USC has had to come out so often is that Slovis constantly puts Trojans in bad situations. Slovis ’mistakes Friday night resulted in 14 points in Oregon and the final turnover of the Pac-12 Championship Game. It seemed shaky all night and the mechanics weren’t there again. After making several mistakes, he played scared the rest of the game. That was the wrong game because Slovis played so badly. He finally threw a fourth-quarter interception, something he hadn’t done in previous games (but had been about to do so). His luck, like that of Clay Helton, was over.
Clock management
This team does not understand the basic management of the clock or the waiting time. That the Trojans had to burn in a dead time on the 4th and 20th is ridiculous. At that point, the team should have finished getting the penalty instead of wasting the prized product. It’s hard to understand what Clay Helton is thinking sometimes or how USC becomes so mentally fragile in situations where basic awareness could mean the difference between a touchdown and a failure.