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USC 20 at Oregon 47 (final)

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ttk;1581587; said:
Personally I'm just taking this as a call to earth for the season. A lot of the rational Trojan fans came into the season expecting probably a 3-4 loss year, really dependent on how our QB played and how the defense did. We lost our QB to the NFL a year earlier than we'd thought and of course practically our entire defense. And then we were looking at a guy who had never started or a highly-touted but still true freshman QB.
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What I'd be worried about if I were a USC fan is that the big question mark at the beginning of the season was QB, yet USC hasn't had a great year despite the fact that the young QB has performed really, really well.
 
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methomps;1581732; said:
Well, that sucked. Defense has disappeared over the last three games after being suffocating to start the season. With McCoy and Havili out with injuries, the offense had no hope of carrying the defense.
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The Saints would have had a tough time carrying the defense Saturday night in Eugene.
 
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Taosman;1581943; said:
The most shocking part was the Duck run game! If you can't stop or even slow down the run, what does that say about your defense? SC could easily lose again.
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You can also put that down to the inexperience of the D-line, and I thought the LBs of USC took a lot of bad angles and kept getting burnt. There were plenty of running lanes up the gut of that defense.
 
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BB73;1581306; said:
My poll voting is based on a body of work for the whole year - I don't treat performance in year-end games any differently than beginning of the year games. I think that the 2 teams that played the best football over the entire season deserve the BCS Title game bids - not necessarily the 2 teams that are playing the best football at the end of the season.

I believe that Oregon would probably handle Boise State fairly easily if they played now. But Boise State did beat them, and they're undefeated, so despite their weak schedule, I'm having a tough time justifying moving Oregon above them. That may change by the end of the season.

USC was somewhat overrated in the human polls - they weren't being penalized enough for losing to a fairly bad Washington team. And I know they had injuries for that game, but that's part of the game, I don't give teams a pass for that.

The placement of Oregon and Boise State will be interesting in Sunday's rankings.
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Based on the body of work for the whole year - not just the game in which they played each other - who deserves to be ranked ahead of whom? I'm not saying throw it out the window - but for me the rest of Oregon's body of work far outweighs Boise State's resume. I think the transitive property was fine for this instance only up to a certain point. When Boise State started struggling with bad teams while Oregon was blowing out teams in the top 10, that changed things for me.
 
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jlb1705;1581977; said:
Based on the body of work for the whole year - not just the game in which they played each other - who deserves to be ranked ahead of whom? I'm not saying throw it out the window - but for me the rest of Oregon's body of work far outweighs Boise State's resume. I think the transitive property was fine for this instance only up to a certain point. When Boise State started struggling with bad teams while Oregon was blowing out teams in the top 10, that changed things for me.
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At this point, I think either point of view is valid. Frankly, I'm surprised that most of the pollsters agreed with me, keeping Boise State ahead of Oregon.

I wouldn't use the 'transitive property' phrase in this instance, it's just a head-to-head result, and other than that both teams have won all of their games.
 
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jazzman;1581952; said:
You can also put that down to the inexperience of the D-line, and I thought the LBs of USC took a lot of bad angles and kept getting burnt. There were plenty of running lanes up the gut of that defense.
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The USC board was touting this DL as one of the best ever. Mentioning it as The Wild Bunch pt. 3. They have had some injuries but then again, most DL's do.
 
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LordJeffBuck;1581561; said:
I'm sorry, but I just don't see all of that elite athleticism, and certainly not compared to other top teams. I think that USC is in danger of becoming a paper tiger, a lot of hype and not much to back it up.

Notre Dame experienced the same thing in the 1980's - every year, they signed a veritable "who's who" of high school prospects, but they had just one NC to show for it. By the early 1990's, all of that recruiting momentum had stalled out, and the program rapidly declined to its present moribund state. A similar thing happened to Florida State in the 1990's, when they were the unquestioned recruiting juggernaut that kept bringing in a bevy of bue chip prospects every year. In each case, part of the problem lies with the coaches, who become lazy and recruit kids based on reputation rather than reasonable projections of what they will do at the college level ... and part of the problem lies with the recruits, who feel that simply signing with the top dog means that they have "arrived". I mean, it's almost gotten to the point that a recruit has to justify his five-star ranking by signing with USC ... but how many of those kids have actually played like five-star players or displayed five-star athletic ability? Not too many, IMHO....
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ttk;1581587; said:
One big loss and it comes to being a paper tiger.... ouch.

Personally I'm just taking this as a call to earth for the season. A lot of the rational Trojan fans came into the season expecting probably a 3-4 loss year, really dependent on how our QB played and how the defense did. We lost our QB to the NFL a year earlier than we'd thought and of course practically our entire defense. And then we were looking at a guy who had never started or a highly-touted but still true freshman QB. Oh, and we'd just lost both our offensive and defensive coordinators to another team. Considering we have one of the toughest schedules in the country (who else plays 4 ranked teams on the road??) and it was a recipe for a true "rebuilding" year: tons of coaching and player turnover, lots of youth on the team, and a ridiculous schedule.

What ended up happening is we all got hyped up because of the early surprising play of the defense and the stellar growth of Barkley. When you see a true freshman lead a team into the biggest crowd ever assembled at Ohio State and come away with a victory, it's hard not to get amped up over that. Same with beating Notre Dame for the 8th straight time. It was beginning to feel right. Sure we lost to Washington, but it was the perfect recipe for that loss -- play against our former coordinators, on the road, with a horrible QB. We end up losing a small one every year for some reason so it just made sense.

The wheels started coming off a few weeks ago when the defense started giving up huge second-half and 4th quarter points. It was easy to point to "well we had a big lead so they probably relaxed" and you could hope a big game would keep them in it the whole time.

This was really the first time in a VERY long time that I knew going into the half that we were probably going to lose. It was clear we had practiced for the wrong schemes and weren't going to be able to adapt because our defense is too young and too inexperienced to know how to do that right now.

Moving forward I'm hoping it will rally the guys and get them to put in all their effort. It's been a really long time since a humbling defeat like that, so hopefully the guys live up to what it means to be a Trojan and they will Fight On. There was a lot of good to take from the game, especially offensively, with Barkley playing well for most of the night. Considering we were without our starting FB (Havili), starting TE (McCoy), and our main red-zone rusher (Stafon Johnson), the offense performed very well and I can only expect it will get better as the younger guys like Blake Ayles and Butler and so on get more playing time and more experience, and Barkley connects with them more.

So hopefully the coaches can make something positive out of this, and I'm confident that they can.
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Make that two big losses in three weeks ... Stanford 55, Southern Cal 21 ... with a 14 to 9 win over a crappy Arizona State team sandwiched in between.

You still confident that the coaches can make something positive out of this mess...?
 
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