I mentioned in my column today that Max Browne has a higher passing-efficiency rating (144.9) at Pitt than Sam Darnold (139.1). A few people have complained that Browne ran up his rating against Youngstown State and Rice.
But that is not the point. The point is USC’s mediocre offense has brought Darnold’s rating down.
SC’s offense has let Sam down
Sam has made numerous mistakes. On the read-option, majority of the time he’s not taking what the defense is giving him. He’s repeatedly targeted passes on the receivers wrong shoulder.
From a technical standpoint his footwork has been bad at times. Go review the film.
I know during the off season Clarkson was working on his throwing motion. But hey!…if it ain’t broken way fix it
…it’s broke now, Gabby…..
I’m sure some physical and mental adjustments will get him back on track. I don’t know if Tyson has it in him. I know Kiffin had his issues as a head coach, but when it comes to developing QB’s he’s one of the best. Nick knew what he was getting when he hired him
I know it sounds crazy —but— after abandoning a throwing motion you feel comfortable with, coming back to it makes you uncomfortable, too (for a while, anyway).
#It’sAMentalThing
Wasn’t Clarkson was it? I thought his qb coach was Jordan Palmer, who was at practice this week again. According to stories in the Register and other sources they worked mostly on his long passing and trying to get more air under his passes.
I’m wondering if losing 25 lbs has caused him to lose some core strength. Could be the reason his off balance throws aren’t as strong.
It’s ALMOST unbelievable that the coaches (and Sam) couldn’t leave well enough alone.
You know that was his personal decision and he does that on his own. Helton has been on record as saying, as early as last year he felt that Sam’s delivery was just fine, and the criticism of his motion was much ado about nothing.
It was also mentioned that Sam wanted to work on his long ball because he was weak at it last year.
Also, there was that time with the Mannings at their summer academy where they worked with him.
At the end of the day, there is just too much attention and most of it he sought out himself.
I hear what you’re saying, Pudley. And I bet Sam could kick himself for messing with what he felt comfortable with (throwing-wise AND weight-wise) all through last year’s 10-3 record, his days on the scout team …and before that in high school..
I’m just saying there’s a lot on this kids plate and he shows it. Some is his own doing and some by different coaches and much by fans not much unlike ourselves who have elevated his abilities beyond reasonable expectations.
I also think they expanded the playbook during the off-season as is normal and he’s just got too much to digest. I think (because who can know) last year we saw him just doing what came natural rather than try to fit it into a specific play. Couple that with an inconsistent offense and well…
I would say you touched all the bases on this one. Actually, maybe there’s one more —-I think Sam misses JuJu and Adoree and Zach —not just as players, but as friends.
Surely he misses his friends but also they were leaders, when Juju or Rodgers came back to the huddle or sideline, I think they let him know what to expect the next time, now it’s his job to explain to the kids. These plays are mainly read options and they’re just not being read the same way yet. One play last week he threw a pass to the WSU bench because he read an out route and Pittman read post..
I remember the play. It gave me a knot in my stomach —because, by the time it happened, I was already starting to see chinks in our offense.
I only played quarterback as a little kid before I moved over to what we called halfback in high school —-but even in CYO football I can remember somebody not being where they were supposed to be —and trying in the next one second to find where they actually were and throwing the ball there. Is the game too fast in college to make that adjustment?
Some plays have preset routes and adjustments can be made with time, but on read routes the ball is in the air before the receivers show the read. In other words the ball is out before the receivers make their cut, so there is no adjustment for the qb to make.
Very helpful. Thank you for that, Pudly!
Play calling!
If Browne’s passer rating wasn’t the point, why did you make that point? Just say “USC’s mediocre offense has brought Darnold’s rating down.”
He put it in there just to be a d**k
The point is the W at end the game. How we get there is the fun part.
I like your first sentence. For me personally . YET How we get there ;after Stanford ,has been like the quote “I spent a week in El Paso one day “
Wolf, you are so in love with SD! Just propose to the guy already. Never mind He’s A Turnover Machine, and that’s on him.
Chaz Beefcake won’t let him.
Wolf is blinded by love and can’t perceive Sam’s issues……..cakes stuffers from the same problem
Louisville suspends two more assistant bb coaches, indictments expected within next two weeks..who’s next?
The college president. Some of these presidents have to know what’s going on and implicitly authorized it. That’s how assts can get lenient treatment. Roll over on an AD or other higher-ups, agree to testify and boom…
Story of Pitino taking a $1.25 million and the school getting $10-$25,000. This is crazy!
Really? I think the big pay-off to the school is the huge shoe/apparel K, no?
It will be now but hasn’t been. Craziest thing I ever heard. Rationale was that he was the greater benefit to the students than the school. Google the story was out earlier this week. Couldn’t imagine that happening except in some backwater college town, but not Louisville.
Who cares about what another qb is doing. Spend more time finding real USC information, injury reports, etc. instead of writing this trash. It might be fun to actually be a reporter for once.
Agreed.
It’s not just “another quarterback.” It’s a former USC quarterback who transferred after he was demoted for not doing the job last year.
Seemed to be a great guy, but he chose to leave USC for what he felt were greener pastures. Best of luck to him, but yes, he is just another QB now that currently has no bearing on USC.
USC’s offense does suk, both in play-calling and execution. I’ll leave the design and theory of the system we use to the geniuses on this blog.
Imagine if we still had Browne as our QB! How long would Helton last then? Time to get back on track CH. The next three games will determine what we Trojan fans can expect in terms of your ability to adjust and correct weaknesses. Hope you are up to it.
Yep. Clay and Tee need to come up with a game plan that doesn’t sacrifice Sam to the rush in the next two games. The one thing that Oregon State does have is a more than adequate d-line. And Utah has a world class d-line and just about nothing else. If we can’t come up with a way of running our offense in the light of these well known facts, we are not in good hands.
I, too, hope we are up to it, Jack.
It makes me sick how we have wasted Darnold so far. I don’t like Helton’s public defense of his underachieving Trojans so far either. Sure enough, we came up against a tough team that was ready for us and we got beat.
I wish Helton would just say he and Tee are looking into alternatives to give Darnold more time and re-establish our running game as well as focusing on tightening up our DBs. Why is that so tough for CH to spit it out?
The lame stats he quotes as indicators of success turn me off. We looked bad against W Mich, great against STAN, lucky against TEXAS, bad against CAL and meh against WSU. ORE ST doesn’t even matter because that’s a gimme at home. Maybe if we lost to ORE ST, CH would get down on his knees and make some needed changes.
Beat the Utes and the Irish and look impressive doing it. Is that too much to ask? With this team so far, yes. I’d love to see how Darnold looked without DLs in his face every second. He’s a great player who is being forced to do too much for an uneven team. Does CH know this? I’m not sure. That’s not good either.
WSU was the ultimate trap game. Having the Utes at home is big. Win that game and the conference is ours.
…And to do that, we’ll have to find a way to deal with the best d-line we’ll face all year.
Hope our O-Coordinator and O-line are up to it.
For some reason, I never saw WSU as a trap game. We’d been hearing about this short week Friday night contest against the tricky Leach with the good QB ever since the schedules came out.
Trap to me insinuates a game we might take for granted. With the way USC has been playing, why would one single Trojan player or coach overlook what people had been warning us about for many months. Especially with ORE ST coming up at home (now that’s what I would call a trap game!).
What totally shocked me was how WSU ran the ball on us. Wow. Gap city. They have a nice little, keep-you-off-balance offense. USC looks like a power team with no power. Darnold is playing sub-par, but so is the entire USC team. Frankly, I thought we gave it our best shot. We got beat man-on-man all over the place.
Last night during the BYU game they quoted Leach as saying he was an assistant to Lavell Edwards and that his WSU offense is basically Edwards old offense.
Are you sure you know the true definition of a trap game, I doubt it…..just saying
That game was far from a trap game. Perhaps your terminology was screwed up
Loved every word. Jack.
USC cannot afford to struggle against OSU. They need to execute on all phases of the game. I’m afraid that a struggle to beat OSU would mean at least two more losses the rest of the year. Notre Dame and the Pac12 Chhmpionship game come to mind, possibly Utah.
Do the players need to have another ”players only meeting”? If so, that would mean there could be a problem between the players and the coaching.
The offensive struggle reminds me when USC played Washington, a few days before Sark got fired, and Helton was the OC. USC scored a touchdown after running the ball down the Huskies throats. Then, got the ball back, after a defensive stop with the momentum gaining. Did USC go for the kill and run it again? No, they pass the ball and went three and out. Washington gets the ball back and scores and wins the game. The Washington defensive player being interviewed, said he was surprised USC started passing the ball. They were tired and thought USC was going to run the ball from there on.
That’s what we’re seeing. The play calling is very inconsistent. I guess they wanted to prove they could run and play physical against Stanford, but play a spread offense against everyone else. We don’t have the receivers needed to be a finesse spread offense or whatever they want to call that offense. If I may borrow a word from Fred, it’s SARK football.
Our blocking schemes don’t fit that of a physical team who wants to establish dominance in the trenches and a run game.
I hope they can turn it around.
It’s just sad that the USC coaches know a hundred times more about college football than we ever will, yet they open themselves to such reasonable yet critical observations.
I don’t think we’ll learn anything against ORE ST. I’m afraid we won’t have fixed things in time to beat the Irish in South Bend. ND has a lot of superior athletes and their coach is against the wall. Helton wasn’t ready for WSU. Why should he be ready for ND? Hope he gets the train that’s coming down the track.
You are absolutely correct.
Seems like a lot of people are worried about Helton now. In a way, it also seems unfair to CH. He’s won 13 in a row and just lost a tight, tough road game against a good team.
Yet, sometimes USC looks so mediocre, even bad, it’s just hard to fathom. I think we’re all shocked that the USC OL, WR and DB groups seem so sub-standard (for a school like USC!).
It’s like CH just dumped some big surprise on USC fans that he’d known about all along – we don’t have the horses.
Anyway, most of us bought the Kool-Aid. It turns out we were oversold and somebody’s got to pay. The buck stops on nice guy Helton’s desk. Sometimes I wish he were cutthroat, like McKay, Robinson and Carroll all were.
Jack, I think he’s (Clay Helton) somewhat a victim of circumstance and bad timing. I think if we don’t lose 3 starters on the o-line, one the day before and two during the game, we win going away. I’m not making excuses, but I’m a realist, and on the road against the quickest defense in the conference would be very hard to overcome. Nonetheless, there are no moral victories.
We win that and are 5-0 and even with our ranking not many predicted we’d go 5-0 before the season started. But at that, Sam isn’t Superman. He misses passes regularly this year even when he has time. His reads are clearly off and timing seems askew, much like the game against ND last year or the beginning of the Rose Bowl. If the coaches want to earn everyone’s respect like you said, they will need to figure out how to slow the game down for Sam again, because there is a deer in the headlights look to him right now.
The o-line is problematic, but if Sam settles in, I believe he’ll have the whole team behind him, rather than on his back.
Maybe CH will coach better now that USC is no longer ranked among the elite and is a long shot to win the conference. Our pre-season goal, the CFB PO, was very realistic and is already gone IMO.
I’m not much for excuses. I don’t buy ’em and really good teams don’t have ’em. As far as the OL goes, even our starters never played that well except for STAN. Our young back-ups may be even worse, but that’s on the coaches as far as I’m concerned.
We all got a little bit ahead of ourselves because of Darnold, but he’s returned to earth and we really miss guys like Adoree, JuJu and Stevie T immensely.
Personally, I don’t think we have the horses this year. Our DBs are average at best. So are our WRs. Our terrific RBs are wasted. Our LBs are average. Houston gets beat like a drum and Smith is tough but lacks range in some set-ups. Thank God for Nwosu, the only real defensive star we have. Rector has been a nice surprise and won the TEXAS game for us. We don’t use our TE position well and we’re hurt there too. Too many injuries this year. Then there’s the play-calling. Come on!
I’ll never forget sitting through the W MICH game in the heat at the Coliseum in first half wondering what this Trojan team had been doing for the pervious 4 months. We suxxed.
I think in the end we’ll finish somewhere between 15-25. I don’t see how a team with an injured, inexperienced OL can finish any higher, and if we start being able to run the ball, I’d like to know why we weren’t prepared for injuries in the first place. Darnold’s a prisoner of our OL.
I’d like a new play caller, OC and OL coach. Seems like an underachieving Tee Martin’s wagging the dog here. It’s a great gig if you can get it.
I’m going out on a limb here I know Jack, but it’s Saturday am, and what the heck. I think we go no worse than 11-2, and maybe still 12-1. I’m thinking Sam gets his receivers and te back in the next two weeks (and by receivers I mean Pittman and Lewis), and regains confidence in himself.
This is a good week for the team to center itself again and regain timing and confidence.
I can’t imagine the the play calling goes unaltered and I hope that Helton knows what needs to happen. We’ll see, starting next week. I believe we have a great future..and at the same time I see your points too, and they’re certainly valid. Where we differ a little though, is where you blame solely the coaches and I don’t. I do feel though, that as in any and every organization the buck stops at the top and Helton as to make adjustments. Will he? I think so.
Maybe we can pull a STAN and reset ourselves but I’m just not sure about that. Shaw’s a stronger HC than Helton and I think he’s earned that distinction.
I think I’ve been more negatively affected by Helton’s post-WSU press conferences which show me a pollyannish lack of awareness and failure to recog that USC needs better play calling, not a pat on the back for Tee, which is what I’ve heard.
I also see weakness in Tee’s defensiveness about his silly get-stuffed-on-the-dive strategy. I presume he’s been told to dump that approach which gives me hope. I also like that Swann isn’t afraid to get involved and had a talk with CH last season – so I hope he stuck his nose in again.
Sincerely, I hope you’re right and that players who have done nothing so far like Pittman and Lewis suddenly come to the rescue. I’m not sure how that fixes our OL weakness, zero running game and DB vulnerability though. Just trying to face reality here.
Unfortunately, this ORE ST game won’t tell us anything. We’ll have to wait, I’m afraid, for ND in South Bend to show us whether we fixed anything which might allow Darnold to get back on track. I don’t see us winning more than 10 games with this group, not based on our record but rather on how this team really looks. Pendergast seems to get a pass when his defense is often marginal at best.
So here’s to your more optimistic view! I think your optimism is refreshing.
I am not used to his style either and I wish Tee would just be quiet. After all if you have nothing good to say, you’re better saying nothing, and the way his team lacks any rhythm or continuity he can’t have much good to say.
As far as the passing game goes, and it does have a long way to go, it would take the safeties out of the box and back them up some. At least I hope so.
Next week will be a truer test of where the staff is prior to ND, and will give us a better indication of what’s up! Fight On!
You know Jack, it’s not as though I don’t watch the games or I can’t see the obvious. There’s just plenty out there, some way out of line, but many much more reasonable that point out the negatives right now. What more could I add.
I did point out what I thought was an issue in their training and conditioning program earlier this summer, when people were suffering strains and mild pulls. As a matter of fact it was immediately after D. Imatorbhebhe was injured. This has been ongoing since the coach was brought in by Sark.
I know nothing about S/C. It would seem to be pretty basic, especially for these guys who have devoted their entire lives to it. I don’t think I ever had a muscle pull in competitive sports except a couple of minor groin strains. I finally pulled a hamstring when I was about 38 running to first base. Never had an ankle sprain, high, low, medium, whatever before age 35 that bothered me for more than 2 weeks.
Things seem a lot more complicated these days.
Jack, I can’t disagree with all the criticism of the coaches, players and game plan, etc.. But there is one factor I haven’t seen anyone talk about. And that is IT. This team just doesn’t seem to have IT. The same coaches and philosophy from last year are here this year. Last year the team and coaches improved as the year went on, but not so this year. Many poo poohed Banner last year , and it could be argued this years OL has better talent than him. What he lacked in talent or consistency he seemed to make up for with IT. As did Adoree, JuJu, Stevie & Hutchings. They brought more than talent; they brought IT. IT is during the game, at practice, after practice, in the film room, in the weight room, and in team meetings. Maybe this team doesn’t have IT, or enough people with IT. Team sports is more than talent and X’s & O’s. The difference between winning & losing can be razor thin. A couple years ago, Alabama under achieved (relative their recent success) and Saban laid a lot of the blame on not having full commitment & effort. IT was missing. He recognized the issue & corrected it. Can CH do the same. Time will tell.
This is about as close to a bye as we will get, so hopefully they use it for the benefit of the rest of the season. Get a lead and let some guys rest.
Pitt has a 2 – 3 record – their ‘wins’ are against Youngstown St. and Rice – they’ve lost to OK, St., GA Tech and PA St. – GA Tech is their sole conference opponent they have played.
Darnold is still big man on campus and will make millions one day and live happily ever after.
Big man on campus?! Millions of dollars?! Say no more!
#ScrewThePac12Title&Playoffs
And I thought Doug, the guy Marcia Brady had a crush on was the big man on campus.
Oh, I hope Sam doesn’t see that episode. I don’t think his ego couldn’t take that right now, Jojo……
Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!
That’s a whole other subject, Pudly76…….
No comparison. People were making noise about Sam being the better player during camp last year and it turned out to be true. Let Max be, Flow. Just let him be.
Who cares. Go find out where Justin Fields is leaning. Is he a lock at Georgia or is he still looking at Fla. St?
I can tell that there are some really intelligent graduates from SC: Jack, Michael G, Pasadena Trojan, Utah Trojan, 04 Trojan, just to name a few off the top of my head. SW isn’t one. Sorry.
Arturo —I can tell from this comment that YOU are the most intelligent of all! And the best looking!
#JackWillBeSoHappyYouListedHimFirst
#FightOn!
Hey wolf, your low football IQ strikes again. Try comparing the same fruit. The only way to validate your comparison is to use common opponents.
Since you have a low football IQ, I will let you in on a few things. In a nutshell, Sam has struggled with his reads, ball placement and footwork. I’m sure some of this stuff is hard for you to perceive
LOL! “PS….take owns, cakes, ted, and killer with you….thanks”
Classic!
Point is Browne ran up his stats. He has to, this is his last shot at getting noticed by the nfl, for whatever that is worth.
He makes it sound also as if Browne called his own plays.
I’m going to go out a limb here and predict that Darnold has a better passing-efficiency rating after today…
Let’s hope he does great today, along with the rest of the team.
Scooter, that is the point, Browne has played against weaker opponents compared to Darnold
Pitt is also 2-3 with its wins coming against Rice and Youngstown State. When does QBR trump winning?
2-2 .. Trolls need to keep quiet!
Max was 15-22 for 161 yards in a loss today. 3 of 13 on 3rd down. Enough said
I hope Browne does well. No hate for Browne.
After SW attributed every win to Darnold he is now covering his tracks blaming everybody for not helping Darnold.