USC QB Jayden Maiava’s fearlessness is a work in progress

LOS ANGELES — Jayden Maiava didn’t once mention the win on the ride home.

A couple of hours after he jogged off the turf in mid-November following his first start at the Coliseum, Maiava drove home with family and longtime trainer Keli’i Tilton. They would meet a host of family and friends, a crowd of 40 piling into his one-bathroom Southern California apartment, throwing some meat on the grill. This was a celebration, of the kid from O’ahu, the first Polynesian quarterback to start and win a game in USC history.

But Maiava had thrown an interception against Nebraska. And committed a costly fumble. And as he talked to Tilton about the afternoon, he started breaking down the plays that had gone wrong, not the three touchdown passes he had thrown, not his rushing touchdown. Even on a third-quarter bomb he had unleashed to receiver Duce Robinson for a 48-yard touchdown, Maiava felt his mechanics were off, his weight shifted too much to his backside.

He was unsatisfied. He wanted to work on his mobility. And so he asked Tilton, who had begun working with Maiava while he was playing high school football in Hawai’i, when his flight home was.

“First thing in the morning,” Tilton remembered telling him.

Maiava asked him if he could change it.

“I’m like, ‘Hey, man, just take the day off,’” Tilton, who could not in fact change his flight, told the Southern California News Group.

“He’s just that kind of kid.”

Maiava has led USC (6-5 overall, 4-5 Big Ten) to two wins now, with five total touchdowns in his first two starts, and has appeared wholly unimpressed with himself after both. His ball security, Maiava has admonished, needs to be better. He was shaky at times in a 19-13 victory over UCLA on Saturday night at the Rose Bowl, showing a continued habit of trying to fuse atoms together at his own will, dancing and spinning and ultimately crushed for a monster sack early in the fourth quarter that could have well cost his team the game.

This has been a problem, Maiava fully acknowledged, after the 28-20 victory over Nebraska, when he was stripped on a similar fourth-quarter sack after trying to extend a play.

“No doubt,” Maiava said, asked if he felt he was trying to do too much. “That’s just me being me.”

And yet Jayden being Jayden, ultimately, is the reason Lincoln Riley tabbed Maiava as USC’s starter after nine weeks of the analytical Miller Moss and will roll with him against fifth-ranked Notre Dame (10-1) on Saturday afternoon at the Coliseum.

Jayden being Jayden is what has endeared Maiava to teammates, in what could have been a fragile ecosystem after a quarterback change, linebacker Easton Mascarenas-Arnold not demeaning but praising the risks Maiava takes behind center.

Jayden being Jayden, after all, is exactly how receiver Kyron Hudson described him after the game on Saturday, after Maiava threw caution to the wind in avoiding another sack and whipping a perfectly placed go-ahead touchdown to Ja’Kobi Lane midway through the fourth quarter.

Maiava will be Maiava. A kid who grew up carefree and barefoot on the beaches of O’ahu plays carefree, these days, in cleats on the Coliseum turf. The question that will define his future at USC, ultimately, is how much raw habits can be changed around an innate gunslinger’s mentality – and how much Riley wants to change him.

“The hope is, as time goes on, obviously, that we can continue to just eliminate the couple of decisions a game here where – all of a sudden, you’re putting yourself in a bad position,” Riley said, part of a larger musing on Maiava last Thursday. “And the great ones find a way to do that.”

“But you gotta be aggressive by nature.”

A year ago, when Maiava first transferred to USC from UNLV, he came out for a workout with local quarterback coach Ryan Porter. It was a group session, and several of Porter’s other QB clients were there: Washington State’s Jaxon Potter, former Damien High star Donnie Smith, Mission Viejo High’s Luke Fahey. All, in some form, were a level below Maiava in age or experience.

And yet Porter watched Maiava focus intently on Fahey’s punch step, and Potter’s drops, and then mime their posture off to the side.

OK, Porter thought, this kid has a chance.

Maiava grew up in Hawai’i as a receiver. He became a quarterback, at first, at his dad and uncle’s behest. He played four years of high school football at three schools for three coaches, from Las Vegas to Hawai’i and back to Vegas again.

The kid was raw, and he knew it. Porter recalled Maiava hanging onto his every word.

Have you heard of this? Porter would ask him, demonstrating a technique.

Nope.

Have you heard of this? 

Nope.

Riley said, back in the spring, that Maiava didn’t carry himself upon arriving at USC like some “wide-eyed” freshman. But his knowledge of USC’s playbook needed time. So, too, did more intricate fundamentals. Maiava would send Porter screenshots of clips from practice, as the trainer recounted, where the quarterback’s feet would be parallel to the line of scrimmage –instead of pointed at his target – as he would whip a sidearm throw on a dig route.

“He was like, ‘How do I fix this?’” Porter recalled.

And Porter would marvel, because the kid was ripping throws off of pure instinct that simply didn’t physically make sense.

“Like, your shoulder, your body is not in place to continuously make these accurate throws,” Porter said. “But since you’ve been doing this for such a long time and nobody’s ever corrected you, it just becomes easy for you, you know what I mean?”

“But now, when you can learn how to correct it?” Porter continued. “Oh, my God. Like, lights out.”

Funky mechanics, too, have never inhibited confidence. Porter and Tilton, independently, both compared Maiava’s sheer faith in his right arm to Brett Favre’s. He’s a natural “receiver-friendly” quarterback, as Porter said, Maiava geared to take one-on-one shots if he sees a defender on an island.

“In his mind,” Porter said, “most of his guys are never covered.”

Against Nebraska, in the span of a single second, Maiava managed to stiff-arm an oncoming rusher while rolling to his right and lobbing a 28-yard corkscrew to Robinson off of his back foot. Against UCLA, on that go-ahead touchdown strike, he rolled half the width of the field to his left and hit Lane in the back of the end zone just over the outstretched fingertips of a Bruin defender.

“He throws the ball in the air, you’re like, ‘Oh my God, where is it going?’” Mascarenas-Arnold said. “But I mean, shoot, most of the time it goes to the right guy.”

It’s a controlled-chaos experience in Riley’s offense, more similar in style to past years of Caleb Williams than the nine games of Miller Moss that preceded Maiava. And having a “fearless nature” as a quarterback, as QB whisperer Riley said last Thursday, was important. Hesitate by that much, the head coach said, pinching his finger and thumb together, and a window would close.

“I would rather start there,” Riley said, speaking on Maiava’s decisiveness, “and curve it the other way, than push ’em to be more aggressive.”

The curve is underway. For years, Tilton has worked with Maiava on quickening his release, a 6-foot-4 kid with long strides whose arm action needed to be tightened. It showed up Saturday, on one particular first-half throw over the middle to tight end Lake McRee, Maiava whipping a short-arm dart that could have been intercepted if delivered a split-second later.

And as he continues to grasp offensive concepts and mechanics, both of Maiava’s trainers feel, natural risk-taking won’t actually be risks.

“It’s fresh clay,” Porter said, “and you’re able to mold it.”