Clay Helton likens USC's early setback, young QB to 2016 Rose Bowl team
USC coach Clay Helton doubled down on Sunday night.
After saying in the wake of the Trojans' deflating 30-27 overtime loss at BYU on Saturday night that "this is going to be a special team, mark my words," he took it a step further in his weekly conference call with reporters the next evening.
"Coming home last night, it was a hard ride home, and also addressing our staff this morning, I felt almost like I did walking away from a game a couple years ago going to a game in the state of Utah with a young quarterback [after committing] three turnovers and walking out of that game and going, 'Wow, this could be a really good football team,'" Helton said.
He is, of course, talking about Sam Darnold's first start on the road at Utah after taking over the position a few games into the 2016 season -- a season that ended with USC winning the Rose Bowl. The Trojans won their next nine games, including the bowl win over Penn State, as Darnold began turning himself into a future first-round NFL draft pick.
Helton's program has seemed far from those heights of late, going 5-7 last fall and quickly extinguishing any early-season momentum with that sloppy loss at BYU.
His critics are many and vocal, his seat hotter than ever and while his comments Saturday night didn't assuage fans' frustration with the poor execution on both sides of the ball that led to the defeat in Provo, Utah, his comments Sunday evening will likely not sway anyone either.
Helton has exhausted the benefit of the doubt within the fan base, which only wants to see the Trojans prove it on the field at this point. To that end, Helton's team has its toughest tests lined up ahead with a home game against No. 10/11 Utah coming up on Friday night after a short week, then a road game at No. 22/21 Washington and after the bye a road trip to No. 7 Notre Dame. Those results -- not talk -- will determine the fate of Helton and this season.
But none of that stopped him from selling his optimism Sunday night -- and harkening back to his best moments as USC coach.
"It's a team that I think is a mentally tough team. … They're giving amazing effort right now, but they're young," Helton said. "They're going through some growing pains and making a couple mistakes that they're going to live and learn from and get better with each game. And this is a team, just like that team in 2016, if they stay the course at the end of the year they're going to be a really good football team.
"Now, can they accomplish the things that the 2016 team did? We'll see. But I feel really good about them, about where they are mentally, about the skill that they've got around them and how they're all pulling together. They went right back to work today. There was no down faces, there was no feeling sorry for themselves, they went right back to work."
As for the quarterback comparison that Helton drew with the reference, Darnold made his first collegiate start in Week 4 of that 2016 season in a 31-27 loss at Utah. Darnold, who replaced Max Browne as the starter, was 18-of-26 passing for 253 yards, 0 TDs, 0 INTs and rushed for 41 yards and a TD. USC lost 3 fumbles in that game, including 1 by Darnold.
Meanwhile in the present, true freshman QB Kedon Slovis was making his first road start as well Saturday, but it came on the heels of a terrific performance last week in the Coliseum when he completed 28 of 33 passes for 377 yards, 3 TDs and 0 INTs vs. Stanford. He was the reigning Pac-12 Offensive Player of the Week leading into his humbling afternoon in Provo, Utah.
Slovis was 24 of 34 for 281 yards, 2 TDs and 3 INTs vs. BYU -- including the game-sealing interception in overtime.
The first of those interceptions was a nice ranging play by linebacker Payton Wilgar, who lunged in front of Amon-Ra St. Brown right outside the right hash on USC's second offensive series. That set up BYU at the USC 28 and led to a quick touchdown.
The other two were worse decisions. On the Trojans' next possession, Slovis threw a perilous play-action pass just outside the left seam toward Drake London that linebacker Isaiah Kaufusi easily jumped in front of for the pick that set up another short field and an eventual field goal.
And the final interception ended it. On third-and-6 in overtime, Slovis forced a throw down the middle toward London in double coverage that got batted up in the air and corralled by Dayan Ghanwoloku.
"There was some times, and he'll even say it, that he skipped a progression. We say reads are sacred and don't get bored, stick with your progressions, stick with your reads and there's some times that he just got locked in and guessed a couple times. He'll even say that," Helton said Sunday evening. "It's a little bit being young, a little bit seeing something that maybe is not there. He's still a kid that completed 70 percent of his balls and put us in a position to win, but had three critical errors. At the end of the day, he'll live and learn from them. We're hoping he does just like Sam did in 2016, learn from them and move on and go to the next game and improve."
Again, there are a lot more differences than similarities in that comparison. That USC team actually started 1-3, but it wasn't already in the midst of trying to prove a culture and discipline change following a 5-7 nadir. That team didn't have a coach on the hottest of hot seats who was being scrutinized with each passing week.
But Helton's approach has always been to emphasize optimism and publicly pump up his team, so it's not out of character. He said much of this same stuff last year about where that USC team would end up before it nosedived in the second half on the way to 5-7.
As for that final interception, London was short of the first down marker on the intended target. The television replay showed that Michael Pittman might have been a little more open to the left, but he too was short of the marker.
Helton noted that it was a simple spacing play that "if you go through the read correctly there is a man open."
"We had a very simple assignment pass play called, very simple spacing, quick game play," he continued. "... We like to continue to stay aggresive and the right play was called and it was a play that created an open receiver and it is what it is. The ball bounced the wrong way, good play by their linebackers converging on Drake, the ball bounced up and they made a play -- one more play than us."
Slovis beat out veterans Matt Fink and Jack Sears to win the backup QB job, and then took over in the second half of the season opener vs. Fresno State following starter JT Daniels' season-ending knee injury.
The coaching staff -- especially offensive coordinator Graham Harrell -- have been especially high on Slovis since he arrived in the spring as an unheralded 3-star prospect from Scottsdale, Ariz.
He validated the effusive praise with his performance against Stanford, sparking USC to 35 unanswered points with his near-flawless performance.
The encore didn't so well, but it's hard not to still see his big-picture upside. BYU set out to complicate his looks by dropping eight into coverage, and Slovis forced some bad decisions. For his part, he noted after the game that he needed to show more patience and rely on his check-downs more while admitting, "That gets frustrating as a quarterback when you want to push the ball downfield."
"Every rep you get and every experience that you have, whether it's a success or failure, you're going to learn from. And that young man's going to learn from it too. He takes ownership and he wants to get better each and every day," Helton said.
Where he takes it from here will shape USC's season -- and Helton's already set the bar for that narrative exceedingly high with the comparisons to Darnold and 2016.
Though by now, the fan base is surely less interested in Helton's media responses than waiting to see how his team actually responds on the field Friday night against Utah.