I was hoping the PAC-12 was going to get into that national playoff as well, even though my head was telling me that USC wasn’t going to get the help from Utah that they got against UCLA and Oregon State, two other games they should have lost but didn’t. But let’s face it, Lincoln Riley was never supposed to get this far in Year 1, was he? I mean last year the Trojans ended up with a 3-6 conference record and an overall record that landed them 97th out of 130 FBS programs. To go from that all the way to No. 4! But once they got rolling we couldn’t seem to stop the unrealistic expectations for this team and the wish to relive those great heady memories we have of USC in years gone by—a desire that kept getting fed as they kept winning week-after-week. Well, except for that one little hiccup in Week 7 against yeah, Utah. In that game the less touted QB, Utah’s Cam Rising, threw for 2 TD’s and ran for three more including a 15 play 75 yard drive ending in a TD run and two point conversion with under a minute left to just squeak by the Trojans 43-42.
Utah Head Coach Kyle Whittingham must have delivered quite a “come-to-Jesus” speech at half-time in this one with the score tied 17-17 after USC kick-started the game with back-to-back 75 yard touchdown drives and a defensive effort that held Utah to just a field goal to go up 14-3. At the end of the 1st Qtr it certainly looked as though the Trojan defense was finally going to hold up their end of the bargain. But after being held to a field-goal, a three-and-out, and then fumbling the ball away on their third possession things changed rapidly and after the half Utah only allowed the Trojans seven more points the rest of the way while scoring thirty of their own, 23 in the final quarter to win it going away 47-24.
At the end of the game the two signal callers had QB Ratings within 0.2 of each other, 81.4 to 81.2 with both connecting on around 65% of their passes for over 300 yards and three TD’s each. But it was Caleb Williams that made a couple of critical mistakes down the stretch that prevented USC from attempting a come back in this one. First, he threw a pick half-way through the 4th Qtr with the Trojan’s down 34-24 that led to a Utah TD to go up 40-34 three plays later and then, fumbled the ball on their next possession which gave the Utes a 1st and 10 at the USC 38 yard line. Three hand-offs later Sophomore RB Micah Bernard ran it in from 23 yards for Utah to go up 47-24 where, with less than two minutes left, it stayed. Bernard and Freshman Ja’Quinden Jackson collectively rushed 24 times for a combined 193 of Utah’s 223 yards on the ground with Jackson picking up the other two rushing TD’s for the Utes.
In Week 7’s narrow loss to Utah the Trojans, led by Oregon RB transfer Travis Dye who is still out of the lineup after being injured in their game against Colorado, rushed for 175 yards and 1 TD. In this one even though his replacement, Senior RB Austin Jones, had rushed for a combined 274 yards against UCLA and Notre Dame the Trojans had a dismal 56 yards on 27 attempts. With regards to that and the mistakes, credit the Utah defense that recorded 67 tackles, 7 sacks, and 11 tackles for loss. But not known officially until after the game, USC QB Caleb Williams popped his hamstring in the first quarter and as Whittingham said afterwards; “When you see a quarterback become not as mobile as he could be or should be, you smell blood in the water and you start bringing the heat. I mean, that’s the strategy you want to use. Caleb is a tremendous player, maybe the most difficult quarterback to sack that we ever played against. We banged him up, slowed him down.” More than just slowing him down it looks as though the injury could very well keep Williams out of their bowl game. According to Riley; “He was not even 50 percent. … I thought about taking him out but he wouldn’t let me … maybe the gutsiest performance I’ve ever seen.”
Williams being injured early certainly helps explain the lack of a ground game on the part of the Trojans. With him out of the picture it was a lot easier for the Utes to shut down that part of USC’s offense as well as record multiple sacks against a less mobile QB. But it doesn’t explain away so many tackles for loss or allowing Utah to rush for 223 yards and three TD’s. Let’s hope the next time Lincoln Riley dips into the college football transfer portal he finds a higher caliber of players to play defense. As reported by Josh Furlong for KSL.com; “Kyle Whittingham said his team took a vote whether to even come out onto the field at Allegiant Stadium to play in the Pac-12 championship game. Everybody, he said, had already counted No. 11 Utah out. Friday night was about No. 4 USC locking up a College Football Playoff berth and its quarterback, Caleb Williams, using that forum to secure the Heisman Trophy. So why even show up for the inevitable? Whittingham’s comments were made in jest but it highlighted the “disrespect” the team felt coming into Friday night’s championship game. Utah was the defending Pac-12 champion, but USC was getting all the love. There was a lot of noise. … We definitely got the message loud and clear that a lot of people were underestimating us, not giving us much of a chance in this game, Whittingham said. That’s the wrong group of players to do that to. You shook up a little bit of a hornets nest when that happened.”
“We already knew what we had to do,” running back Ja’Quinden Jackson said. “It was just a regular game to us. Like, we knew we had to play physical. We knew that we had to stick together as one.” But as Furlong writes; “And though Jackson said it was a ‘regular game,’ it was anything but that for the defending Pac-12 champions. It was a moment for Utah to stay at the top of the Pac-12 against a team that for years was considered to be the creme-de-la-creme of the conference. It was a game against a team that brought in some of the top skills players from around the country to build a super star offensive roster. Oh, and it was a game against a team that spurned the conference in search for greener pastures. So it was anything but a regular game for Utah.” It may have taken a complicated tie-breaking system and four games to go their way the week before to get in the championship game, but when the dust settled they walked out the front door with the PAC-12 Conference Championship Trophy in their hands for the second year in a row. Congratulations to Head Coach Kyle Whittingham and the Utah Utes.