Bureau of Statistics

Offense: Turnovers and 3rd down conversions. The latter being an OC and execution issue on 1st and 2nd downs because we're getting into too many long 3rd downs. Or is that just me?

Defense: Scoring and 1st downs. The first can partly be chalked up to having a huge lead in the Nebraska game and the offense turning the ball over and giving our opponents a short field. The latter is a problem, though, because just as we seem to be getting into too many long 3rd downs on offense, our D seems to be giving up a lot of 10-15 yard gains on first down.

One thing they left out: Penalties.

A little bit of quick research shows the following after 6 games:

2006 - 38 for 340 yards (56.7 ypg)
2007 - 50 for 464 yards (77.3 ypg)

Playing aggressive is all good (and a few of those calls at UW were total BS) but many of these penalties seem to have come at rather inopportune times.

Bright side is the Arizona game was our least penalized of the year (5 for 35 yards). Maybe the mistakes are under control.

Only stat I care about is the loss we have this year through 6 games.

Plus, and this just be me who thinks this, but USC's level of competition last year through the first 6 was much tougher than the level of comp SC has faced this year....making these stats somewhat irrelevant.

Just bring on the friggin Irish.
FIGHT ON!

Very interesting, would have never thought that. Then again, the team did have its struggles last year on offense when breaking in Booty.

Interesting comment from one of the Versus commentators during halftime of the Stanford game that I picked up during a replay, went along the lines of "USC seems to be a victim of its own success in the first half on offense". What I took out of it is Sark/Carroll feels for some reason that he needs to get all of the skill players on offense involved to keep them motivated/confident/happy etc. As a result the team is constantly in negative yardage situations come second and third down and drives stall because we don't have that "IT" player on offense to go to.

We need to keep things simple on offense and stop forcing stuff to Turner because his head is down after two drops or a wr screen to Ausberry for 3-4 yards because he is to slow to get open down field. This was especially frustrating during the UW game when JDB was throwing a wet ball all over the field while guys like Stafon (8 yards per carry) and CJ Gable (11) watched from the sidelines.

The plan that Sark had on saturday for Sanchez is how he should have been calling it all year. He ditched the fancy '05 playbook and made calls that put Sanchez in positive situations to succeed. I would really like to see us pound the ball more with our running game. It is evident that this team can with its depth and variety at running back but its almost as if the staff is hesitent to do it be all the supposed talent at wr or our reputation as a "flashy offense". With our defense, we can afford to run the ball down a teams throat. It may not result in the beat downs of the Leinart/Bush era but better to win 27-10 then lose 24-23 huh?

PS, how about throwing Fred Davis a bone!! Maybe our MVP so far, the guy has been our only miss-match when throwing this year. Remeber in the Chow days of showing teams something in the first half and countering it in the second. Why not go to Fred over and over when passing until teams are forced to overcompensate on defense. Would that not open up space for turner, rojo and vidal to work. We had no problem in the past going to a hot hand when in a dog fight, remember Leinart to M. Williams vs. BYU '03, LenDale vs. ASU "03, Reggie vs. Fresno St '05, and Booty in '06 to Smith(WSU) & Turner(UW).

How about a comparison to the 2004 team.

Pete was quoted in May of 2007 in the LA Times (sorry Scott) that this was his most competitive team ever. To me that means he thought this years team was going to be better thant he undefeated 2004 team. Hardly!!

They say nothing lies likes numbers (statistics), but I didn't see anything that truly stood out between this year and last year. Of course, I wish the team had one more point, and the opposition had one less point (Stanford).

The thing that jumps out at me is

> 1st Downs 134 204

Is that a typo? Time of possession is down a little, total offense is up but not much. How to account for an extra 12 first downs per game?

I think Carroll was referring to competition within the team. More players are competing for more spots. Almost no one on the 2004 team was competing for playing time as the starters were that much better than the other guys.

As far as the first downs go, this season we have a more methodical offense without as many spectacular 25+ yard gains. So it makes perfect sense that we are getting about the same yardage/game but it is coming over more plays.

More telling would be Avg Yards/play. I should be somewhere around 10, but I'd bet this season we're around 7. Which is a stat that is killing us in the computers and Oklahoma is doing well in the computers despite their schedule and level of competition.

Something is wrong with those 1st down stats, for us and our opponents. Way too high per game, I think...