LOS ANGELES — You paid for a Mercedes-Benz. You don’t expect to be trucking up the hill in a Subaru. I get it.
You’ve got the third-highest paid coach in all the land, you expect to ride in luxury – like you have in the past, when your USC football team started so many seasons by simply plugging in the coordinates for a national championship coronation and either arriving there in style, or parking pretty close by.
But still. You could do a lot worse than a Subaru, reliable and rugged. And you might even find you enjoy the view more when you’ve started at the bottom and not the top (especially as precarious as that perch has been this season, with weekly shakeups and half of the Associated Press’s Top 10 having vacated those spots if not tumbling out of the top-25 ranking entirely).
You might actually enjoy the climb, up from among the unranked for the first three weeks of the season to 7-2 now, your now-No. 20 Trojans in control of their own destiny for a College Football Playoff spot. Every game from here is essentially a play-in for the playoffs and the Big Ten Conference title game.
What I’m saying is you might find you like surprises – because who’da thunk it!? Bet you didn’t.
In 2024, USC was ranked No. 11 in Week 3 but then 4-5 at this time last season – and 2-5 in its first Big Ten Conference foray.
Now, after Friday’s 38-17 victory over Northwestern at the Los Angeles Coliseum, the Trojans are 5-1 in Big Ten play, with three more opportunities – No. 20 Iowa, No. 9 Oregon and UCLA – remaining on the regular-season docket.
Those games will all be either at home or at least on the West Coast, but anyone paying attention knows the Trojans have miles to go yet. There’s still much to be desired from this team – whose victory over the Wildcats (5-4, 3-3) was a bit of a microcosm for the season at large. An inauspicious start; 14-14 with 7:26 to play in the second quarter. Some head-scratching stuff. Some jaw-dropping stuff. And, importantly, that now-familiar reliable, rugged push.
By the time they’d pulled over for the night, the Trojans had built a 21-point lead, and they’d racked up 482 total yards and 309 through the air against a Northwestern defense that hadn’t allowed a 200-yard passer all season.
But the Wildcats hadn’t faced Jayden Maiava, your no-quit quarterback throwing an interception and then racing back to lay a nasty hit on Northwestern’s Najee Story just before he scored, forcing a fumble out of the back of the end zone for a touchback that gave the ball right back to USC.
Nor had Northwestern probably encountered coaches quite so diabolical. A week after Halloween, the Trojans dressed third-string quarterback Sam Huard as punter Sam Johnson so that Huard, in a matching No. 80, could enter the game undetected for the ultimate fake-out fake punt, spiraling a 10-yard pass to Tanook Hines to an extend a drive that would end with a Maiava rushing touchdown.
Nor had the Wildcats met a walk-on like King Miller, the redshirt freshman running back who continued to do the work of the two injured scholarship stars in front of him, on Friday running for 90 yards on nine first-half carries. The kid from Calabasas finished with 127 yards on the ground – surpassing 100 yards for the third time in four games – plus a touchdown before a shoulder stinger ended his night. He’s OK, and he’s great.
What’s more, your defense adjusted, digging in its heels, getting to Northwestern’s running backs closer to the line of scrimmage so that the Wildcats gained only 28 yards on the ground in the second half after rushing for 102 in the first.
And star receivers Makai Lemon and Ja’Kobi Lane continued to outshine everyone: factory-ordered production, Hollywood flair. Lemon had a career-high 161 yards through the air and Lane’s 74 included several diving snags and one spectacular one-hander in the end zone despite tight coverage.
“Awesome, awesome, I mean awesome win,” said Lincoln Riley, the $11 million coach, whose postgame press conferences at home – where he’s undefeated this season – have sounded much less defensive these days and much more in line with what USC is paying for, confidence in motion.
“We know the more we win, the bigger these opportunities get,” Riley said. “We’ve got some big ones coming up that are big because we’ve made them big. And so I think for the team, just making sure they understand that, they understand how hard it is to get to this point in any year, where you have in front of us what we do.
“And, like, let’s go embrace them.”
It’s been a journey worth embracing so far. You can admit it, you’re enjoying the ride.