Spring check-ins: USC's refresh
After essentially squandering the Caleb Williams era with just 19 wins and zero titles in two seasons, Lincoln Riley and the Trojans are overhauling the program.
If you’ve been reading this newsletter/blog for a while, you might recall my grand theory of the case regarding the Lincoln Riley USC Trojans.
It was that Riley inherited a decent situation on offense from his predecessor and quickly made it an outstanding situation by using the transfer portal to upgrade the receiver talent and bringing in mega-talent Caleb Williams at quarterback. Williams was such an amazing fit for his offense and his impact so considerable, it made the previously moribund Trojans immediately competitive nationally despite inheriting an abysmal defense which hadn’t been taught the fundamentals well.
So the answer for Riley and defensive coordinator Alex Grinch on how to build a defense to match was to use the transfer portal to turn over the roster and a style of coordination we at Inside Texas like to refer to as “call-matching” or “battleship play-calling.” Essentially it’s where you try to dial up the perfect defensive play-call to stuff the offense “E7!” rather than teaching your defenders to read and react and play fundamentals from within a base defense.
This went poorly.
Now it appears the Caleb Williams era is going to be replaced by the Miller Moss era while D’Anton Lynn was poached from UCLA to bring an entirely new approach to defense. Both of these are pretty big adjustments so…how’s that working out?
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