Damien Mama Options

USC could take Toa Lobendahn and play him at his preferred offensive guard or have him replace Chad Wheeler at tackle. That would mean Chris Brown plays guard. There is also the chance Brown would play tackle. That’s going to be a key decision during spring practice.

15 thoughts on “Damien Mama Options

  1. I just looked up the 2017 USC Recruiting class since you don’t get that information here. It’s an eclectic bunch that should drive traffic to the FireClayHelton dot com website. They’ve got a 5 star running back, and then some impressive 4 star guys, then a bunch of 3 stars and a 2 star. Do you give scholarships to 2 star guys? I mean if it’s P-diddy’s son then of course, but this is USC. In all fairness one of the 3 stars is from Mobile, Alabama so that’s probably worth an extra star right there.

    • Donte Burnett was a 3 star guy committed to Wazzu before he flipped and took a blueshirt on signing day. He caught 3 TDs Monday.

    • Stars, smarz. The guys that assign these star ratings don’t know diddly compared how much info the coaches have on these kids. It’s not even close.

      If an SC coach thoroughly evaluates a prospect at his position and decides he thinks that’s the guy SC needs to improve the team, he should offer and just hope to get his commitment.

      A school like USC isn’t ever going to load up on a lot of low-star kids, but USC’s best WR at the Rose Bowl was just some three-star dude and Darnold wasn’t even ranked in the nation’s top 25 QBs – until he had a great SR year and had already committed to USC when he was just another three-star guy.

      Scout and Rivals are wrong so much of the time, it’s a miracle they are still in biz and Scout’s now in bankruptcy and trying to find a sucker who wants to buy them.

      • Scout and Rivals are not that far off, to be honest, although they seem to strike out a lot at QB, but as Dan Weber says, QB is the hardest to project because you have no idea what happens until the QB takes a few hits in a real college football game. It is one thing to rack up yards in high school in Sammamish, Washington, it is another to get knocked around by Bama and Stanford.

        What you are starting to see are programs getting better at projecting talent to fit within their systems, ala Oregon under Kelly and TCU under Patterson. Also, there seems to be an emphasis on this staff to mix the five stars with some more “blue collar” hard workers and weed out the five-star prima donnas and headcases. I think the staff feels burned by Masina and Price.

        As for the two-star, CJ Miller, if he can really run a 4.35 forty at 6’2″, within two years a lot of people will say “can’t believe he was a two star.”

        • I think the services, especially bankrupt Scout, often do no better in the rankings than simply throw darts at a board with a blindfold on.

          For instance, Damien Mama was totally heralded by both Scout and Rivals as an insanely great player. In the class of 2014, Scout ranked him #39 best player in all of America and the #2 OG in the entire country. Not coincidentally, Rivals also had him exactly at #39. The always mediocre Mama didn’t even make the Pac-12 All-Conference Honorable Mention team this team this year – and NINE other Trojans made it.

          Contrast that obviously ridiculously flawed Mama ranking with Christian McCaffrey, who should have won the Heisman a year ago and has always been recognized as a great runner and has been the best RB in the Pac-12 two years running. Stanford people and players will tell you they knew he was special the moment he stepped on the practice field (like Darnold). Scout onlyranked McCaffrey #81 overall and #13 RB, while Rivals again mirrored them and ranked Christian at #77.

          These recruiting people often have little clue about what is really going on or why a player is headed one way or another. McCaffrey always has been three times the player Mama ever was in college and is significantly mentally stronger, yet both services over-ranked Mama like sheep headed over a cliff.

          The recruiting services are interesting entertainment sometimes, though they are vastly over-saturated now with worthless, vague info and as I’ve said, are often ridiculously wrong. It’s the nature of the beast and player recruiting rankings are just very broad generalizations that often omit crucial factors which are the real prognosticators of success or failure.

          • Jack, I agree there is a “color-by-numbers” element to the recruiting services. It is most apparent in QB ratings, where the QB-Guru heroes like Browne and Rosen and Clausen and Barkley and David Sills are vastly overrated compared to their impact because the QB-Guru products can check off the boxes on the recruiting services clipboard while QBs like Darnold and Lamar Jackson and Trace McSorley are either too short (McSorley), too slight and run-oriented (Jackson) or look too much like a linebacker (Darnold).

            But overall the services arent that bad. Mama was, game after game, USC best rated lineman. And remember, the entire OL had to slim down, add muscle and re-learn proper technique after the disastrous season under Connelly, the worst assistant hire in decades.

          • Sorry, but Mama’s just a big slug. At least he was at USC.

            i watched him play, always expecting more, and you don’t need to be a coach to see he lacks athleticism and is slow, regardless of who’s coaching him. You can’t coach bad hips and bad feet.

            Had he gone to Oregon State, not one single person outside of Corvalis would know his name. The guy’s not even an all-Conference player.

            I don’t know what ratings you’re speaking of but he’s no major loss, that’s for sure. Good luck to him in the NFL. I always enjoy seeing Trojans succeed. We will however, miss Banner (another hugely over-rated recruit) and Wheeler (another hugely under-rated recruit).

            You’re a recruiting services guy, I get it. Thanks for keeping ’em in business. Thanks to you, we all get free recruiting info every day whether we believe in it or not. Now, that’s not a bad deal!

    • It can be a challenge to project some of the talent in the deep South because of the wide disparity in the quality and finances of the high schools. You have some kids who would be surefire four stars if they went to well-funded football factories like Bishop Gorman or Mater Dei and hit their weight rooms and followed their nutritional guidelines, but if you are going to some post-Jim-Crow style high school in a very poor county in the middle of the Delta where you are wearing 10 year old hand-me-down equipment and are lucky to get a full meal at night, it is going to be hard to show that development and size to the Rivals and Scout folks, who are looking for very specific boxes to check off and are not projecting what will happen once a kid goes to a school where he can eat three squares a day and start a 21st century training program.

Comments are closed.