The first week of the college football season is defined by the things you saw coming and the complete and total revelations. The former are comforting; the latter are invigorating. Perhaps the biggest revelation of the first weekend took place in the Los Angeles Coliseum.
It wasn't that USC beat up Fresno State pretty convincingly. The Trojans, after all, finished 2013 doing basically the same thing in the Las Vegas Bowl. It was the way the beatdown took place. USC ran 105 plays and gained 701 yards. The Trojans had the ball 14 times and advanced into FS territory 14 times. The defense forced punts and turnovers on 11 of 13 possessions. The secondary swarmed. The offense flew through wide-open spaces.
USC had fun. Trojans were smiling on the sidelines. The Trojans played sexy football (and when USC plays sexy football, it's sexier than everybody else's sexy football). There was a buzz in the Coliseum for one of the first times since Pete Carroll left ... hell, for one of the first times since Matt Leinart and Reggie Bush left. USC's been good since then, but this felt different.
We can say plenty about the drop-off in head coaching talent that occurred when Carroll left and Lane Kiffin took over in 2010. (We can also mention the sanctions with which Carroll handcuffed Kiffin.) For all his quality as both an offensive coach and recruiter, Kiffin hasn't exactly proven a whole lot in the big chair.
But the largest shift came in demeanor. Carroll was as often as not a cheerleader on the USC sidelines, clapping and pumping his first and high-fiving whoever was available to be high-fived. Kiffin's natural state, meanwhile, is slumped shoulders, folded arms, and head cocked to the side, even when he's in a good mood. That seemed to rub off on his team.
Steve Sarkisian isn't Carroll (nobody is), but you could actually catch him smiling a bit on the sidelines. He had his team ready to play well and enjoy itself, and that was no small feat given the circumstances the Trojans experienced heading into the game. (Needless to say "A team captain lies about being a hero, and a backup transfers and calls you racist on the way out the door" doesn't qualify as a particularly good week.) Still, USC looked exciting, seductive, happy, and really, really good on Saturday.
Of course, first impressions only matter until the second impression. And good feelings are typically fleeting when Stanford is involved.
Kyle Terada, USA Today
For all the fun that football can produce, the Cardinal go out of their way to assure that neither you nor they produce any of it. The revelation that was Fun USC Football will get the stiffest test imaginable in only the second week of the season.
So what has to happen for the Fun to survive until Week 3? What does it take to beat the two-time defending Pac-12 champion?
(And yes, we're talking about the chances of plucky, fun underdog USC taking down mean, old Stanford. Who says the balance of power never changes in college football?)
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1. Pass efficiently
Stanford has lost five games in the last two seasons (and counting). The Cardinal allowed just 111 rushing yards per game. In their two 2013 losses (including their 20-17 defeat at USC), they allowed a combined 88 yards on the ground. Against a defense that ranked sixth in Rushing S&P+ and fourth in Adj. Line Yards, opponents knew they had to try to pass.
Opponents threw the ball more than 50 percent of the time on standard downs, while the national average hovered around 41 percent. And despite a killer pass rush, opponents threw the ball more than 70 percent of the time on passing downs as well. (Yes, there were some pass-happy teams on the schedule -- there were also Army, Oregon, and Michigan State.) Part of this had to do with the score of the game, but only part; the above stats filter out garbage time. Even when the game was really close, opponents decided the pass was the way to go.
We'll see how much that changes now that Stanford has experienced turnover up front. But the Cardinal are still starting three fifth-year seniors on the line and four upperclassmen at linebacker, many of whom were highly touted recruits. It's difficult to worry too much about the Stanford run defense.
Meanwhile, Stanford's pass defense was certainly good, but the Cardinal did rank just 29th in Passing Success Rate+ last season. In six of 14 games, they allowed a passer rating of at least 135.0, and they went just 3-3 in those games. (They went 8-0 when passers didn't hit that mark.)
In 2014, it's conceivable that teams could pass even better on Stanford. Despite the old age of the players in the front seven, it's not automatic that the Cardinal will replace the production of Josh Mauro, Ben Gardner, Shayne Skov, and Trent Murphy, who combined for 29 sacks and 13 passes defensed.
And it's the same story in the secondary, where Stanford is starting all juniors and seniors but must still replace the high level of safety production achieved by Ed Reynolds, Usua Amanam and Devon Carrington (combined: 5.5 tackles for loss, 13 passes defensed). Even if regression isn't likely, it's difficult to imagine the pass defense improving too much without these players.
The Cardinal had no problem making plays against UC Davis last week (eight tackles for loss, four sacks, seven passes defensed), but that's UC Davis. USC's passing game hummed last week against a reasonably experienced Fresno State defense. Cody Kessler completed 68 percent of his passes at 15.8 yards per completion, four players had at least 50 receiving yards (freshman JuJu Smith had 123), and 10 different players caught a pass.
Kessler had a strong game against Stanford last year. It's a given that he'll have to have another one, at whatever tempo USC chooses, for the Trojans to win in Palo Alto.
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2. Turn Stanford's five-yard gains into three-yard gains
It's such a powerful memory that we almost think of it as the norm: Tyler Gaffney averaging 3.5 yards per carry against Oregon, seemingly by gaining exactly 3.5 yards on every carry, creating convertible third downs, and converting them. And to be sure, Stanford did a magnificent job of staying in third-and-manageable against Oregon and converting 14 of 21 third downs. But this approach has small margin for error.
Stanford's run-first tendencies are predictable, but in 2013 Stanford's run game was more effective at establishing an identity than actually running the ball. The Cardinal were just good enough at it to set up the pass, which was often devastating -- leading wideouts Ty Montgomery, Devon Cajuste, and Michael Rector (all of whom have returned in 2014) combined to average 19.7 yards per catch with a healthy 61 percent catch rate.
If you could slow the run down, however, Kevin Hogan's passing effectiveness atrophied.
- National standard-downs Success Rate: 48.3 percent
- Stanford's standard-downs Success Rate (11 wins): 51.1 percent
- Stanford's standard-downs Success Rate (three losses): 37.0 percent
When facing a higher frequency of passing downs, the Cardinal's effectiveness on those downs drifted as well.
- National passing-downs Success Rate: 32.0 percent
- Stanford's passing-downs Success Rate (11 wins): 35.0 percent
- Stanford's passing-downs Success Rate (three losses): 31.1 percent
Hogan is a solid quarterback; you can't have a weakness at quarterback and win back-to-back titles in such a tough conference. Still, Stanford's offensive success hinges on the ability to gain five or six yards on the ground on first down instead of two to three.
How will Stanford's rushing attack take shape against USC? A superfecta of Kelsey Young, Barry Sanders, Remound Wright, and Ricky Seale (the last three of whom are listed as interchangeable on the second string) appear set to share carries, and the first three names above combined for 18 carries and 108 yards (6.0 per carry) against UC Davis. All four outpaced Gaffney from an explosiveness perspective, but none are the punishing bruisers that the 6'1, 227-pound Gaffney was.
If the Cardinal trade a little efficiency for a few more big plays in the run game, that might not be the worst thing in the world. But against USC, it's all about efficiency. If the Cardinal can crank out five-yard rushes and remain in control of the chains, USC's back seven, which is loaded with freshmen and sophomores, could eventually take risks and get burned by Stanford's explosive receiver trio. But if Stanford is facing a multitude of second-and-8s, USC will take advantage.
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Stanford is a three-point favorite, and even though the F/+ rankings are pretty bullish on USC overall (10th in the preseason projections, sixth now), the Cardinal are still projected to win by seven points. Still, we'll learn quite a bit more about the Trojans even if they are to lose.
If they are committed to a fast tempo this year, how well will they pull it off against college football's best tempo killers?
And with 21 freshmen, redshirt freshmen, and sophomores on the two-deep, how well can USC handle a Stanford lineup dominated by upperclassmen?
If the Trojans battle well and lose a tight game, that says very good things about their Pac-12 South prospects moving forward, even with an 0-1 start. If they struggle and eventually lose control of the game, it will be both an excusable occurrence and a sign that the Trojans are not quite ready for the limelight they were posing for a week ago. Assume Stanford wins this one, but expect Fun USC to make at least a few appearances.