I mentioned in a story last week how a former USC assistant coach told me you could hear opera music on the headsets when the offense is on the field because no one is challenging Lane Kiffin.
Quarterbacks coach Clay Helton relays the down and distance and that’s about it. And that exposes a problem.
If Kiffin will not hire an offensive coordinator and insists on calling plays, there is no one to question him or anything else during the game. Or at least provide some insight from the pressbox.
As the season progresses, I suspect this offensive coordinator issue will only become a bigger talking point.
A head coach surrounding himself with a bunch of yes men is about right! This is a Kiffin show (both Lane & Monte). And this program is about to deteriorate as top players will not stay their senior year and top recruits will change their minds. I can finally see a reason why deceased Raiders owner Al Davis called Kiffin a lier. But in the college game he is in dreamland.
PC did the same thing after Chow, Orgeron and Davis left, he surrounded himself with Kiffin, Sark, Yogi Roth, how did that end up ?
I was re-watching a condensed version of the Arizona loss and one noticeable thing regarding the clock management issue is that I think Kiff’s insistence on calling the plays takes away his sight of the big picture required by his HC position to oversea a game. Kiff spent nearly every second of those last fateful :55 seconds staring at his laminated playchart. How can he possibly be following the clock or having an awareness of the time crunch if he’s not paying attention to the clock? I still blame Barkley for the awful clock management, but blame falls on Kiff as well since he was in position to take proper control.
You can’t blame the QB when he has to wait for his idiotic coach to call a play from his Cheesecake Factory sized playcard. I blame Barkley for not just taking what was given to him in the red zone when he threw a pass to the TE and missed by a mile.
Maybe the solution is to wire a game clock to the upper corner of Kiff’s play chart. It would be cuter.
Throw Lane Kiffin under the bus, why don’t you all, huh? Doesn’t Barkley deserve at least just as much of the blame? It was his bad throw to an open TE–it was Barkley who seemed to have lost most of his composure in the final minutes–it was Barkley who didn’t seem to know how to work the clock, EVEN if Kiff was calling the plays. It was also Barkley who, at times, had all the time in the world to make a play and he utterly and disastrously failed. Let’s be real here.
That’s what I’ve been saying the second since Barkley’s Hail Marry went incomplete. This is the first trojan game this year where the majority of the fault does not belong to Kiffin. The majority belongs to Barkley.
You are barking up the wrong tree Wolf.
Once again dumb wo