Instant Analysis: California-USC

Mark Sanchez, Joe McKnight, and the other members of USC’s offensive unit are in the eternal debt of their teammates on the other side of the ball. Yet again, the Trojans prevailed in a putrid Pac-10 penalty-fest only because a dominating defense was good enough to overcome a mountain of mistakes.

This year in Los Angeles has been a difficult one for the beautiful people who have expected spotless smackdowns of USC’s opponents. Yes, the Trojans are still winning, but only because their defense has been able to blot out the shortcomings of Southern Cal’s other two units. Saturday night in the L.A. Coliseum, mediocre punting and poor passing kept the point totals down and the highlight reels short for the program loaded with sex appeal, as style points were nowhere near the old and venerable bowl in the City of Angels. USC did bag yet another victory, but a team accustomed to full-fledged excellence is delivering the goods in only one of football’s three phases.

There’s no shame in victory, and with this win over the Golden Bears, USC has only Oregon State to deal with in the Pac-10 race. The Beavers do control their own destiny, but they must win out against a difficult closing schedule—Cal, Arizona, and Oregon—in order to steal a Rose Bowl bid from the Men of Troy. Tonight’s win over Cal will put the pressure on Oregon State to walk the tightrope in the final three weeks of the season. This was a particularly meaningful moment for Pete Carroll’s crew, and that fact shouldn’t go unmentioned.

With all that having been said, an account of this awful football game simply can’t hide the paucity of premium plays produced in this clunker. Outside of the two defenses, nobody earned glory during this sloppy sixty-minute slog, not even a Pac-10 officiating crew that missed numerous calls and failed to receive help on USC’s first touchdown, a Patrick Turner catch that went scandalously unreviewed by replay. USC linebacker Brian Cushing was flagged for a roughing-the-passer penalty despite the fact that he lightly pushed Cal quarterback Nate Longshore only one step after the ball was released. On the flip side, a Cal penalty for an ineligible man downfield—which wiped out a game-tying Bear touchdown in the third quarter—was not accompanied by an identification of the player. The head referee, while omitting the reference to the player number, as he is supposed to do, could not even provide an explanation for the penalty itself. The officiating and replay review lapses provided an ugly, though appropriate, accompaniment to a night of frustrating football for every human being not associated with a defensive unit.

Special teams didn’t play a particularly central role in this game, but they struggled just the same. USC suffered two muffed punts that prevented good returns from materializing, while also getting substandard punting that enhanced Cal’s field position. Cal’s kickoff specialist returned the favor by starting the second half with an out-of- bounds boot.

It was on offense, though, where this game spun sideways and lost any semblance of a battle between upper-tier teams in a BCS conference.

Sanchez, the USC signal caller who has struggled throughout this season, displayed panic in the pocket and the up-and-down inconsistency that has dogged him since his virtually perfect opener against Virginia back on Aug. 30. Drifting into the Cal pass rush, and occasionally forcing a ball into traffic, Sanchez could not come up with special sequences to supplement a reasonably effective rushing attack. USC’s solid ground game should be producing home-run balls from his right arm, but the fact that Sanchez isn’t smoking secondaries with downfield darts is an indication that the quarterback isn’t performing the way Pete Carroll would want him to. In addition to Sanchez’s fits and starts, running back Joe McKnight once again coughed up the football on a fourth-quarter drive in Cal territory. Gifted but erratic, McKnight did nothing to put an end to his penchant for balky ballhandling, and as a result of his fumbling ways, the Golden Bears stayed in the game longer than they had a right to expect.

Regrettably for coach Jeff Tedford, however, Cal’s offense actually had a harder night at the office than the Trojans did. Despite a tidal wave of key penalties from USC’s defense, particularly pass interference oopsies in third-and-long situations, the Golden Bears couldn’t take advantage. Three drives typified the entire night of football follies, and they all came when Cal had the ball.

Drive number one was a 63-yard march that somehow managed to take more than eight minutes off the Coliseum clock, yet only managed a field goal. The possession lasted as long as it did because two USC interceptions were nullified by penalties—one by the dubious roughing penalty mentioned above, the other by a legitimate pass interference call on a ball that, for the record, would have been intercepted even if the Cal receiver had not been knocked off stride. This drive featured penalties on four straight snaps: a Cal false start; USC’s defensive pass interference; another false start against the Bears; and then a hold against the boys from Berkeley. USC gifted three points to the Bears (their only score of the night, as it turned out), but even with second and third chances, the Bears couldn’t enter the end zone and acquire an early lead.

The second drive that defined this dud came later in the second quarter. Cal moved the ball a net total of 15 yards downfield, yet chewed 4:10 off the clock and, at the very least, kept USC off the field. The painfully slow forward movement from the Bears showed that even when they succeeded, they failed; on the earlier field goal drive, Cal failed in a significant sense, even though it succeeded on a smaller level. Such was the absurdity of this agonizing affair.

Drive number three in this maddening mystery arrived in the third stanza. Shortly after the ineligible-man-downfield penalty that went unexplained by the officials (even though subsequent replay shots suggested that Cal’s slot receiver didn’t line up properly, suggesting an illegal formation penalty and not an “ineligible” penalty), the Golden Bears appeared to gain their big break when they received yet another defensive pass interference flag from the generous Trojans on a third-and-13 play at the USC 30. Just two snaps later from the 10, quarterback Kevin Riley—who played the second half after Longshore handled the first half—threw a pass into traffic that was deflected and turned into an end-zone interception by SC defensive back Josh Pinkard. This interception—besides denying the Bears their last best chance for a touchdown—perfectly illustrated the head-scratching happenings in Hollywood. USC gave Cal every possible opportunity to tie the game and possibly win it, but the Bears simply refused to take advantage. On a night when USC continued its season-long pattern of littering a field with yellow laundry and stacks of slip-ups, the defense coached by coordinator Nick Holt overcame the many hardships it faced, some of them self-inflicted.

USC lost to Stanford last year, in one of college football’s greatest upsets ever. If the Trojans don’t manage to smooth out their many rough edges, they just might lose two in a row to the Cardinal. Pete Carroll will take this win, but the 57-year-old coach will turn 80 in a few weeks if the hiccups continue to hinder his skilled but sketchy team.