The USC Trojans have done it… but what they did was not good in any way. The Men of Troy squandered a golden opportunity to have an undefeated regular season and a Pac-12 title. They played their most error-prone and mistake-filled game of the season. The Trojans blew play after play, opportunity after opportunity, sequence after sequence. They made one mental mistake after another on Friday night. It’s as though nothing changed all year long. There wasn’t a lot that went right on Friday night against Oregon in the Pac-12 Championship Game, so instead of the usual “studs and duds,” we have to be honest and just consider the many duds from this loss.
Let’s take a look at where it all went wrong.
Duds
Clay Helton
He had the chance to do something remarkable; instead Clay Helton coached his team as he did every other week, which is to say, at a mediocre level. The Trojans looked just as poor as they had nearly every other week, except for the second half versus Utah and the first half versus Washington State. The team looked mentally unfit. The Trojans consistently got in their own way. They committed penalty after penalty without regard for the fact that players were hurting their teammates in the process. When the head coach of this team had the chance to get his roster ready for a conference title and a New Year’s Six bowl, he instead oversaw one of the poorest outings of the season. It’s a shame USC likely won’t learn from this game or this season, instead using the fact that it fell just short — only one score — to justify the continued ignorance of glaring errors.
Kedon Slovis
USC’s quarterback played well in previous fourth quarters this season, but as a whole, he hasn’t played particularly well this year. The reason USC has had to come from behind so often is that Slovis is consistently putting the Trojans in bad situations. Slovis’s mistakes Friday night led to 14 Oregon points and the final turnover of the Pac-12 Championship Game. He looked shaky all night and the mechanics weren’t there again. After he made several mistakes, he played scared the rest of the game. This was the wrong game for Slovis to play this poorly. He finally threw a fourth-quarter interception, something he hadn’t done in previous games (but had come close to doing). His luck, as with Clay Helton’s luck, ran out.
Clock Management
This team does not understand basic clock management or timeout management. That the Trojans had to burn on a timeout on 4th and 20 is ridiculous. At that point, the team should have just taken the penalty instead of wasting the precious commodity. It’s difficult to understand what Clay Helton is thinking at times or how USC becomes so mentally frail in situations when basic awareness could mean the difference between a touchdown and a failed down.
