Musings from Arledge: Forgetful Alamo Bowl showing for USC

All’s well that ends well, according to that guy from Stratford. But what about things that end like that?

Better grab the pitchforks and torches. No, seriously, grab ‘em. We might need them. 

First things first. I don’t know why they still play these second-tier bowl games. In a world of twelve-team playoffs, bowl games are irrelevant—and everybody knows it. That’s why most of the best players opt out. So why play a game that big chunks of both teams don’t even bother to attend? Is it because we want to settle the age-old question: Who is better if many of the best players on both teams don’t care to play? 

These bowl games are staffed like intrasquad scrimmages over a bye week when the coaches keep out the best players on the team and see what the kids can do. Only we televise them. And count the wins and losses. And count the stats. Why?

Seeing whether USC can win a game in which Makai Lemon, Ja’Kobi Lane, Bishop Fitzgerald, Kamari Ramsey, Eric Gentry, Waymond Jordan, Elijah Paige, Anthony Lucas, Lake McRee, Alani Noa, and Walker Lyons can’t play or can’t be bothered to play seems rather pointless. It’s like asking what would happen if USC lost one of its team buses on the way to the stadium—the one with the best players on it. It’s like asking if the original Dream Team can beat Angola if Patrick Ewing has to bring the ball up the floor and Christian Laettner has to take every shot. 

These games have something of a child’s birthday party feel to them. Let’s see who can pin the tail on the donkey but, first, you have to wear a blindfold and get spun around three times. Let’s see who’s fastest … hopping in a gunny sack. Let’s see if we can win a football game playing a receiving corps that has barely played and largely has no idea what it’s doing.

It’s stupid. I understand the benefit of the extra practice sessions—you know, assuming USC did, in fact, use its extra practice sessions. It wasn’t clear last night whether they did. But the fact that teams can only practice if they play in a meaningless game is one more example of how idiotic the NCAA rules are. 

These non-playoff, second-tier bowls are senseless. They should be scrapped. How can the Pac-12 be gone, how can USC-Notre Dame be gone and second-tier bowls still be around? I think we’re scuttling the wrong cargo, people.

But I suppose if we’re going to play in them, and if they’re going to count the stats and count the wins and losses, you might as well play hard and try to win, right? I’d expect everybody to play hard and try to win even in one of those intrasquad scrimmages over a bye week. What’s the point of playing football if you’re not trying to play your best and win?

And that’s why I will not accept the argument (rationalization?) that many USC fans will make today. They’ll tell Francis to lighten up because it makes no difference whether USC wins a game full of backups. 

But it does matter how those guys play, whether they are starters (and plenty were) or backups.

This should have been an ideal opponent for USC. Yes, USC was playing with a half-filled roster you might expect on week two of a zombie apocalypse. (Anybody that hasn’t had their brains eaten and isn’t the walking dead, let’s go!) But TCU is a pass-happy team playing a backup quarterback. It finished in a four-way tie for seventh in the crappy Big Twelve. It’s a team that can’t run the ball and can’t stop the pass. It’s a team, in other words, tailor-made for USC.

Oops. 

So that was a dreadful loss. For starters, the USC offense was a mess. I know the offensive line was a patchwork group. I know every reliable receiver other than Tanook Hines was missing in action. But in crunch time I’d still expect a Lincoln Riley offense with its starting quarterback (a preseason Heisman favorite in 2026, mind you) to consist of more than just a series of low-percentage, back-foot throws where we’re hoping for a circus catch or a PI call. That isn’t exactly the stuff of offensive geniuses, is it? Lincoln Riley made about a million dollars last night. Did that look like a million-dollar effort? 

TCU isn’t very good but they wisely went all in on the Notre Dame strategy: hold the wide receivers over and over and assume the refs won’t call all of them. If that sounds catty, it’s not; I wish USC’s secondary was close enough to receivers to hold on every down. (Now that’s catty.)

USC had a solid lead in a very winnable game and folded. It had a two-score lead late in the fourth against a mediocre opponent and found a way to lose. It had the ball at the two-yard line in overtime and found a way to settle for a field goal. It had multiple long-yardage situations against TCU on their last three possessions and managed to give up a play on all of them. 

And it involved one of the worst defensive plays I have ever—nope. Too early. 

When Lincoln Riley was hired, everybody knew that he had an incredible record as a quarterback developer and overseer of offenses. There were two big questions. Can Lincoln Riley actually build a culture? He didn’t build the winning culture at OU. Bob Stoops did that. Stoops took over a program in the gutter and won a national title in year two. He wasn’t as good as Saban, Meyer, or Carroll. But he was the next guy on the list. He won a whole bunch of games. He built the program that Lincoln Riley inherited. Could Riley build his own? And can Lincoln Riley field a good defense? Those were the big questions.

Four years in, the answer to both questions appears to be “no.” Everything about the USC football program has improved over the last four years. The NIL program is strong. The administration’s commitment is strong. The money to hire the best coaches is there. The new facility is on the way. The general manager and his staff are top-notch. The athletic director is top-notch.

Everything is better except for what we see on Saturdays and, if we’re being frank, what we see from the guy behind the big desk. Lincoln Riley is now 35-18 after four seasons. And, yes, there are some mitigating circumstances. But there’s not that much mitigation in play. There’s not enough mitigation to justify a 66% winning percentage and a slew of embarrassing losses. If Lincoln Riley had signed an ordinary five-year contract when he arrived at USC, he would likely be gone this morning.  

But he’s not gone and, instead, we’re left telling ourselves that Riley will continue to grow into the position. We’re left to tell ourselves that once he has a roster full of blue-chip recruits that then he can compete with the Ohio States and Georgias. We’re hoping that with so much trending the right direction that Riley himself will, somehow, become the coach we hoped he was when he took the job and inked his long-term, nine-figure contract. A rising tide lifts all boats, right?

And then we watch the fourth quarter and overtime of the Alamo Bowl. And we have major doubts, because … well, how could you not? USC collapsed in epic fashion against a very average opponent on national television. It looked every bit a Paul Hackett or Clay Helton or inebriated Sark ending. It looked like a program that is lost.

But if you’re going to collapse on national television, you might as well end it the way they did, right? In for a penny, in for a pound. If you’re going to collapse, why not do so in spectacular fashion with a single, horrific display of football that encapsulates everything that is currently wrong with the program? 

On 3^rd and 20 in that situation, you know that TCU is just trying to get some yards for a makeable field goal attempt. At least I knew that. And you knew that. And Lincoln Riley undoubtedly knew that. I’m not sure what the players on the field knew. 

But I certainly know what they did. USC needed Marcelles Williams to just grab cloth and hold on until help could arrive. Open-field tackles are tough, and you didn’t need a perfect form tackle that stopped the ballcarrier in his tracks. You just needed him not to whiff. And he whiffed.

So did Jadyn Walker who used awful tackling form and didn’t keep his feet. Kennedy Urlacher joined in the fun. He didn’t use the sideline for leverage, got sucked inside, and then dove at the ballcarrier as he cut up the sideline. That’s three missed tackles so far. And we haven’t gotten to the part of the play that makes me truly angry.

There were arguments amongst the USC fan base as to what was wrong with the defense. As always, people said there is a lack of talent. And that’s true, if you’re comparing USC to Georgia or Ohio State. There was also a lack of fundamentals, and one of the black marks against the current defensive staff is the inability to get the defensive line to play low, to get the edges to keep proper contain or use any effective pass-rush moves, to get the linebackers to play downhill instead of standing, waiting, and catching. The basics, in other words.

But even that’s not the biggest problem with the 2025 defense. Not everybody can outrun or out-physical the opponent. Young guys sometimes struggle with fundamentals that they didn’t need to learn to dominate high-school competition.

But everybody—everybody—can give great effort. There is no excuse for loafing on the football field.

USC had three missed tackles on that last play. Not good. Now from the rest of the guys, you needed pursuit—effort! And you didn’t get it. 

I’ve been complaining all year that this defense goes long stretches—often entire first halves—where it just doesn’t give a great effort. It wasn’t huge schematic changes that made the difference. Most weeks the guys just started playing harder later in the game. And here, on 3^rd and 20 in overtime of a nationally televised bowl game, you saw horrible effort all over the place. This is the play that perfectly distilled what I hated about the 2025 defense and why I’m happy to see D’Anton Lynn make his way east.

Watch the replay. Count the number of guys who are jogging to the ballcarrier. 

Braylan Shelby was jogging and never got in on the play. Desman Stephens was jogging, if we want to use a charitable description for his effort. Much of the time he was walking. He could have cleaned up the play if he had been giving any effort. And Christian Pierce was jogging. 

Let me say, I like Christian Pierce. I think he’s a good football player and I’m glad he’s coming back. But Christian Pierce jogged to the ball, and when he got there, he didn’t take the play seriously. He had the easiest job on the field. There is no easier tackle in football than that sideline tackle when you have the angle and the ballcarrier has nowhere to go. I missed plenty of tackles while playing this game. I’m not sure I ever missed that one. In fact, I could have made that tackle last night. At 52 years of age, a little over two weeks past stomach surgery, if my family’s future depended on it, I could have made that tackle. 

How did Pierce fail? It almost looked like he was afraid the ballcarrier had stepped out of bounds and therefore let up. He made no effort to drive through the ballcarrier. He made half-hearted contact with his chest and fell down. Which means that Pierce (1) is likely one of the few guys on the team who cares about avoiding a stupid penalty and (2) also isn’t doing his freakin’ job. You play through the whistle.

With his miss, there was nobody left to help since much of the rest of the defense was jogging like that crowd that followed Forrest Gump. 

Part of creating a winning culture is making sure that your guys play hard. Yes, they need to be fundamentally sound and skilled and you need solid schemes and a bunch of other stuff if you want to be an elite program. But the core requirement for a winning culture is that your team plays hard. You must insist on it. You must accept nothing else. Your team must give great effort every down, every Saturday.

USC’s defense did not do that this year. It just didn’t. That defensive line took the first half off most weeks. It took the entire game off against Illinois. We all pretended it was bad chicken. It wasn’t. It was bad effort. And it took off the critical play of the game last night.

On the last play of the Alamo Bowl we saw the fruits of a program that doesn’t have a winning culture. That’s what it looks like. It looks like half a defense showing bad fundamentals and screwing up a routine play and a bunch of other guys half assing it to the ball on the most important play of the game because, I guess, it just doesn’t matter enough to them. 

Like it or not, that’s USC football four years into the Lincoln Riley experiment. And I’m sorry if that’s not what you expected when watching that press conference at the top of the Coliseum four years ago. It’s not what I expected either.

Lincoln Riley isn’t going anywhere. As they said about the banks in 2008, he’s too big to fail, or at least his contract is. So we’ll just have to hope that things get better. We’ll have to hope that the culture building starts up in earnest this offseason. 

If USC is going to become the program that all of us want it to be, they’re going to have to make some changes. They need to hire a defensive staff that can teach the fundamentals and, above all, demand consistent effort. Maybe Riley will make a great defensive coordinator hire. He has the money and the administration’s support. Hire Pete Kwiatkowski and you’re getting a guy with a fantastic track record. I suspect Pete K won’t let his guys jog to the ball. Maybe he can get what Lincoln Riley and D’Anton Lynn couldn’t get from their guys: consistent effort. I guess we’ll see.

And they’re going to have to find some guys on defense. If you go into next season with this roster and add only the shiny freshman class, we’ll be watching another crappy, second-tier bowl game next year, too. Let’s not kid ourselves. It’s time for a portal overhaul on defense. You don’t make the playoffs with mediocre players who jog to the football. You need an edge rusher that actually scares opposing offenses and demands help for the tackle. You need a new linebacker room. Just a whole new one. You need somebody who can control the A gap. You need your young corners to grow up in a hurry. You need a bunch of stuff.

And, above all, you need effort. My old friend Kevin Bruce, when he was a captain on one of John McKay’s great teams, would have lit into his teammates for that effort last night. I can only imagine the conversation we would have had last night had my friend still been around. I’m not sure how much this team’s leaders care. You have a bunch of young guys making good money and having important conversations with their agents about free-agency options. And you’re seeing a lot of effort that would be unacceptable in a high school junior varsity game. 

I’m sick of watching guys play who seem to care less than I do.