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USC 20 at Oregon 47 (final)

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BuckeyeMike80;1581499; said:
Athletically (which is, IMO, subjective), you won't beat USC.

But you can have all of the athletes you want and not have a good football team. Football players win games, athletes do good in the combine.

It's about molding those athletes into football players. Carroll has been very good at this, but last night their lack of tackling and discipline defensively finally burned them in a big way.
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Ron Zook calls bullshit.
 
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LordJeffBuck;1581383; said:
That was USC's first double-digit loss since 11-25-2000 (Notre Dame 38, USC 21), and their worst loss since 11-01-1997 (a 27-0 whitewashing by Washington).

For all of the blue chip recruits that USC gets, it sure seems like the Trojans lack athleticism. Besides McKnight (who is really a role player and not a workhorse back) and Mays (who has huge holes in his game), does USC really have many superior athletes, especially compared to other elite teams like Florida, Alabama, Texas, LSU, and even Ohio State? I'm just not seeing it right now....
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It wasn't a matter of SC not having the athletes because they do. Last night Oregon's offense was clicking so well, they had SC on their heels the whole night, SC didn't know where the next shot was coming from, they had no chance. It's going to be interesting to see if Oregon can keep it up like that or if this was just one of those nights. Last night they would've beaten anyone. This is NOT the same team that I saw lose to Boise, struggle to beat Purdue and look unimpressive against Utah. Sine then they've destroyed Cal, WSU, Washington and USC and also beat UCLA pretty good with their back-up.
Just think how good they'd be if they had 4 and 5 star recruits like we do.
 
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OregonBuckeye;1581486; said:
They have some great athletes. Their OL, Galippo, McCoy, one of their LB's(Smith or Jones?) who they claim runs a 4.3, Everson Griffen. I don't think they lack athleticism one bit.
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Buckeye86;1581494; said:
USC has talent, everyone looks bad when you have a bad game, I don't think you can say the program lacks athletes based on one, or even a few bad games
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BuckeyeMike80;1581499; said:
Athletically (which is, IMO, subjective), you won't beat USC.
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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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SC is down this year, but it's hard to argue with the results from the past. They had three first round QBs, blew the doors off of the best two teams in the B10 last season, blew the doors off of the most dominant OU team this decade, blew the doors off of a very good Auburn team at the time, destroyed very good Michigan teams under Carr, crushed very good VaTech teams a couple of times. They have gone out and played with the best of college football and have done very well.
 
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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.
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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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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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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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With Walter Thurmond being out for the Ducks, I thought that the SC passing game would be the beginning and end of the game especially with RoJo getting back into it and Damien playing well. IYO, what did Aliotti and the Duck defense due to stifle your offense? I didn't get to see the game after it was 20-something each side.
 
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Buckeye86;1581494; said:
they obviously had a bad game, if you based your opinion of Ohio State's athletes on the Purdue game you would be hard pressed to find many guys who played like superior athletes in that one, even though as Ohio State fans we know that there is first round talent on the team

USC has talent, everyone looks bad when you have a bad game, I don't think you can say the program lacks athletes based on one, or even a few bad games
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Then they've had four bad games, OSU, ND; both they coulda/shoulda lost, and the two they did lose. Could be a fall off in talent, but perhaps more reflective of the cost of losing a key staff member(s). Funny though, the loss of Norm Chow didn't slow down their offense one iota.
 
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cincibuck;1581847; said:
Then they've had four bad games, OSU, ND; both they coulda/shoulda lost, and the two they did lose. Could be a fall off in talent, but perhaps more reflective of the cost of losing a key staff member(s). Funny though, the loss of Norm Chow didn't slow down their offense one iota.
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I wouldn't call the ND a shoulda lost game. They were up 34-14 in the 4th quater and the Irish never tied the game.
 
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