Pac-10 Week 9 Notes and Observations: USC Trojans

By Dave Consolazio, November 4, 2009 7:43 am

USC Trojans 6-2 Overall (3-2 Conference)

This Week’s Score: Oregon 47 – USC 20

Next Week’s Opponent: @Arizona State

How do you put what just happened this Saturday into words?

Domination obviously comes to mind.

We saw something that many of us never thought we’d see in the Pete Carroll era; a USC team get completely manhandled.

Seeing a final score of 47-20, had I not seen the game, I’d have immediately thought that Matt Barkley must have finally shown signs of being human, and finally had a true-freshman implosion.

Quite the contrary. Matt Barkley may not have been spectacular, but 21/38 for 187 yards, 2 TD, and 1 INT was not a meltdown at all. And the interception came on the last throw of the game, it had absolutely no effect on the outcome. No Joe McKnight fumbles. No quirky bounces. The Trojans just got dominated, through-and-through.

Perhaps most interesting was the fact that heading into the half, the score was 24-17 as a 17-17 tie was broken with a little under two minutes left by an Oregon touchdown. This Trojans team under Pete Carroll has been one of the best 2nd half teams in the country; they make the necessary adjustments, and their conditioning shines through as the game wears on.

But not this time. Pete Carroll and the defense had no answer for Chip Kelly’s dynamic offense, and the offense was completely shut down in the second half by Nick Aliotti’s stingy defense. The Oregon Ducks out-coached and outplayed the USC Trojans in the second half by a wide margin; again, something I never thought I’d see under Pete Carroll.

With so many great defensive players lost to the draft last season, many of us were expecting a drop off this year. That drop off didn’t occur at the beginning of the year, so most of us just assumed this unit remarkably hadn’t missed a beat despite breaking in so many new starters. But as the last three games’ awful defensive stats have shown us, this defense is what it is; a group of talented athletes that lacked experience and needed to learn the ropes and gel together.

So where do you go from here? Quite simply, you just try to pick up the pieces and finish the season strong.

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