Stanford hit and hit and hit on both sides of the ball; USC was lucky that football is only four quarters.
You will hear about how great Stepfan Taylor was, but except for one play -- for 59 yards, where the PAC-12 officials missed a block in the back tackle -- USC had actually held Stanford to under 3 yards per carry for three quarters. Eventually, that hitting wore down the mental strength of the Trojans, as the fourth quarter they were easily fooled into playing the run on pass plays, and playing the pass on run plays.
But a game is not three quarters, and USC's offensive line was awful, dank, stink, lousy, horrible, grotesque, crappy, weak, and every derogatory adjective in the dictionary.
The tackles were okay, but the guards and center were just absolutely ugly. The Stanford defense figured it out at halftime and practically made it their bread and butter to send someone up the middle on a variety of blitzes all second half.
Not all of the blame sits with the offensive line, though; Trojan running backs missed on blocks, too. And Barkley under center, failed to do a single hard count to help stop the Cardinal nose tackle from hitting the redshirt freshman Cyrus Hobbi; after getting sacked the fourth time, and after seeing his center get bowled over on his back, you'd think Barkley would have mixed it up with the hard counts on consecutive plays.
Some offensive play calls you scratching your head. One perplexing call was to run the draw-play with just over a minute left in the game, near the 50 yard line...for maybe two yards and a waste of about 15 seconds. I liked the diversity of passes involving the tight ends and 3rd receiver Nelson Agholor, though.
Bottom line: the defense couldn't hold the game for the offense to win, but in no way could the offense win a tight game in a smash mouth battle. You can't win a game if you're using cheerleaders as your offensive line, after all.
They should wear skirts during practice this week.
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