USC preaching patience after disheartening loss
LOS ANGELES — As they filed out of the locker room, picking up their post-game meals on the way to the team bus, USC’s players looked wide-eyed and shell-shocked by the Trojans’ 45-27 loss to Oregon State.
It was, to say the least, a disjointed performance. Dropped passes, missed tackles, four turnovers, 11 penalties and, most disconcertingly, little fight or resistance as the Beavers went on a 35-3 run to bury the Trojans.
“I feel like we got punched in the chin and not everybody retaliated the right way,” cornerback Chris Steele said. “It’s all about the way you respond to things. I feel like today, there was a team out there that probably wanted it more than us.”
It was a similar scene to two weeks ago, when USC (2-2, 1-3 in Pac-12) was walking out of the Coliseum in disbelief after a gutting loss to Stanford. It was that defeat that ended Clay Helton’s tenure as head coach, and began Donte Williams’ as the interim man in charge.
The first two games of the Williams era have looked similar to the last two of Helton’s: An all-around win, and a thorough defeat. But after the loss to Oregon State, USC players were preaching patience.
“This is not a turnaround overnight; we’re trying to build something here,” quarterback Kedon Slovis said. “Coach Donte has done a great job of starting to hold guys accountable and changing the culture and building the culture. You’re not going to see a change in one week. We have a lot of work to do and I think the main thing and message we’re gonna have is we gotta stay together and stay up.”
Added safety Isaiah Pola-Mao, “We’re not a finished product right now so we still got a lot of season left.”
The message from Williams in the post-game locker room was simple enough: Come back tomorrow, get back to work. New week, new opponent. Watch film, correct mistakes.
And there were a litany of mistakes to correct, at every position group and among the coaches. But despite a lull in energy in the third quarter, when Oregon State out-scored USC 14-0 and set up another touchdown on the second play of the fourth quarter, Williams felt like the team finished the game with the right energy.
“I wouldn’t say guys quit at all,” Williams said in his Sunday press conference. “You kick the onside kick, you see guys going to get the ball, making tackles and getting interceptions, still showing a lot of emotion. So I wouldn’t say that. I probably would say a couple guys had down faces.”
USC travels this coming weekend to Colorado, a 1-3 team that has had its own share of struggles the past couple weeks. While the Trojans can’t afford to overlook anyone at this point in the season, the real keys won’t be so much schematic as it will be about USC course-correcting and not repeating the mistakes of the past weekend.
“It’s a different opponent, and once again, the opponent is faceless. The opponent mainly is us. What we need to do,” Williams said. “We got to concentrate on us. As long as we concentrate on us, things will take care of themselves.”
INJURY REPORT
Wide receiver Kyle Ford did not dress for the Oregon State game with a knee issue, Williams said. Ford has been playing through the injury for the last two weeks, but it flared up at the team hotel before going to the Coliseum and he informed the coaching staff he could not play. Safety Chris Thompson Jr. also did not dress after a leg injury that’s been nagging him this season flared up late in the week.