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After watching his group put together its most complete and most dominant performance of the season last weekend, USC offensive coordinator Graham Harrell stood up the tunnel outside the locker room in the Coliseum and put it all in perspective.
He talked plenty about freshman phenom QB Kedon Slovis and about having four receivers all top 100 yards in a game for the first time in program history. He talked about bolstered running back depth and the development of the group collectively through his first season, etc.
But the most significant comments Harrell made that evening were not a reflection but rather a projection.
"Offensively, that's what it's supposed to look like," he said matter-of-factly, after the Trojans piled up 52 points and 643 yards in that romp over UCLA.
The Trojans won't always be playing an overmatched Bruins defense unequipped to defend the kind of passing attack that emerged down the stretch for USC, but his point was about execution, offensive balance and fully leveraging the talent advantage this team has on offense against most opponents.
And while those specific numbers are extremes -- it was the most yards USC had piled up in a game since trouncing Idaho in 2015 -- the performance fit the trajectory of the unit over the second half of the season.
Football stats are malleable -- they can be shaped to fit a narrative, but bear with us here.
Over the second half of this season, the final six games, Harrell's offense averaged 37.3 points and 495.5 yards per game. If -- and it is an if -- that total had reflected the full season, the Trojans would be tied for 13th nationally in scoring and rank 10th in total offense.
The contrarian perspective would be to argue that most of USC's toughest games came in the first half of the schedule (vs. Utah, at Washington, at Notre Dame), but the other side of the argument is that the Trojans played two of those games without Slovis and that even when healthy the freshman QB was just beginning his adjustment to college football. The more recent version of Slovis is probably a better indicator than his first road starts (losses at BYU and Notre Dame), and the offense in general was growing through its first games in Harrell's system.
All of that is to say, maybe those second-half numbers indeed carry some significance in the big picture, even if the worst game in that stretch (355 yards, 24 points vs. Oregon) came against the only ranked opponent.
