The decimation of depth at the safety position for USC this fall has been extreme, and as he talked about it after the game Saturday defensive coordinator Clancy Pendergast couldn't recall a similar level of personnel attrition at one position during his career.
That's how redshirt-senior nickel Ajene Harris came to learn a day before that game against Arizona State that he was moving to safety, once senior mainstay Marvell Tell (stingers) became the latest loss at the position.
Well, Tell looks on track to return this week, but the Trojans are now without freshman starter Talanoa Hufanga (broken collarbone) so the season-long shakeup at safety continues -- one that has now included two transfers (Ykili Ross and Bubba Bolden) and two season-ending injuries (Hufanga and Isaiah Pola-Mao).
So it looks like Harris will remain out of position for at least another week.
Pendergast wouldn't definitively state his plans there, but Tell and Harris worked as the first-team safeties in practice on Tuesday and Wednesday with redshirt-senior Jonathan Lockett filling the nickel role.
"I'm familiar with the playbook, everything about it, so it's just another piece of the puzzle that I just got to fill," Harris said Wednesday. "So it's not really a big jump -- it's just another piece of the puzzle pretty much."
Harris tied for second on the team with 7 tackles against the Sun Devils, but he was beat for a 44-yard touchdown pass early in the game and Pro Football Focus marked him down for a team-high 3 missed tackles while grading him out as a 44.3 for the game (on a 1-100 scale).
"You'd like to walk a guy through every position, but you're talking about a guy that learned on Friday he was going to play safety," Pendergast said.
Said Harris: "I was told the day before the game. Nothing that I couldn't really adjust to, just something I'm getting my rhythm in this week."
Harris played safety some as a freshman and senior in high school and he said the USC staff worked him there a little bit back in the spring to get him some experience elsewhere around the secondary.
He said his big takeaway from the last game was that he felt needed to be more patient, that he was a little bit fast in his backpedal.
"I did OK. I gave up a touchdown that I want to take back, but I did all right coming up making some tackles. I could have wrapped up a little bit more on some tackles, but I'm learning and this week I feel like I'm going to have a big game," he said.
Pendergast often talks about getting the best 11 players on the field, and it seems from practice this week that he believes having Harris and Lockett on the field achieves that. USC's other options at safety are redshirt-sophomore C.J. Pollard, who made one start early in the season before getting beat out by Hufanga, and freshman walk-on Jordan McMillan.
"Those are who we got left, that's who we got out there and we'll put the best 11 guys out there we feel gives us the best chance to win," Pendergast said.
