USC's season shifted swiftly Saturday with a fourth-quarter collapse and 24-17 loss at Minnesota.

The Trojans dropped from No. 11 in the AP poll to out of the rankings entirely, they left their College Football Playoff hopes on life support and renewed recurring critiques and questions about this team.

But all is not lost with the Trojans getting a chance to host No. 4-ranked Penn State in the Coliseum on Saturday and potentially orchestrate another dramatic pivot in their season.

For that to happen, several plaquing characteristics of this team can't continue to happen.

We dive deep into those matters, the silver linings from the loss and a defense of Lincoln Riley's play-calling as it came under fire after the defeat Saturday night.

We cover it all in the weekly First-and-10 breakdown with our 10 most significant takeaways from the game after combing through the film.

There’s no way to get around the disappointment of last weekend’s loss for the Trojans. A road upset at the hands of the Minnesota Gophers was not on most fans' radars when considering season outcomes for this team, and it leaves the Trojans’ playoff hopes looking rather dicey with two losses now already on the board. USC would almost certainly have to win out in order to make the CFP, with difficult tests against No. 4-ranked Penn State and No. 11 Notre Dame looming as well as matchups against Washington, Nebraska and Rutgers that cannot be taken for granted. Given that, it’s easy to pick apart this USC loss in a vacuum.

The impulse will be to judge the Trojans’ performance in this game as an overarching indictment on what this team is and can be for this season, and there’s certainly reason to do so. However, a quick zoom-out will show that last weekend was similarly disastrous for many of the top teams in the country. Blood Week always comes without warning, sometimes lying dormant for years, but its eventual arrival is inevitable all the same. In this latest great sacrifice to the football gods, almost half of the top-12 fell between Friday and Saturday night. Then-No. 9 Mizzou got their back ends handed to them by No. 21 Texas A&M, then-No. 10 Michigan went down to unranked Washington, then-No. 4 Tennessee lost a shocker to unranked Arkansas, and the former No. 1-ranked Crimson Tide fell 40-35 to Vanderbilt -- yes, Vanderbilt! Not to mention, a top-10 Miami team squeaked by Cal by a point in a game that was entirely the Bears’ to win had the ACC referees not actively chosen to give Miami a chance to steal victory for the second straight week.

Disappointing as USC’s loss was, it was by no means unique last weekend, and many of the lessons to be learned from this Blood Week can be shared amongst the lot.

For starters, it’s notable that each of these upsets came on the road. Winning on the road in college football is always hard, but I think there’s plenty to be said about just how difficult it’s been in particular for the teams who now have to travel across the country as a result of conference realignment. We already know how difficult that task is at the NFL level; it should come as no surprise that college teams have been struggling in their first year of having to do the same. So far this season, Big Ten teams are an atrocious 2-9 when playing road games across 2+ time zones. If you’ve watched any number of those games, you’ll notice that they’re largely characterized by particularly poor and sloppy starts by the road team, of the same kind we’ve seen from USC at Michigan and Minnesota. There’s good reason to argue that’s exactly what we saw in the Miami-Cal contest as well, with the Hurricanes coming out flat and uninspired before finally getting the engine revving late in the third quarter after falling down 25 points.

These travel distances are now going to be a permanent fixture of conference play, and it will fall on teams to ensure that they’re adequately prepared for the challenge at hand. Nonetheless, it was always likely that players would have major growing pains over the initial period of adjustment, and I think we’ve been seeing that across the board so far this season. With that in mind, the Trojans should be very aware that No. 4 Penn State will find itself in the same predicament at the Coliseum on Saturday. The blade cuts both ways, and USC needs to find a way to take advantage in what might be the biggest game of its season.

There’s no denying that the loss at Minnesota was the Trojans’ worst performance of the year to date, as it was clear to see that the team was not playing up to the standard it’s set for itself on either side of the ball. Despite the very real arguments that just one or two different officiating decisions could have swung the game in USC’s favor, this felt like a game the Trojans deserved to lose. It’s disheartening to see a team lose its edge and drop its level of focus like that, but hardly any squad goes through a season without such a disappointment. Whether or not that disappointment lingers or triggers a bounce-back is the real question, and one that every loser of Blood Week will look to answer going forward. Alabama lost that stunner to Vandy just a week after notching the most impressive win of the year against former No. 1 Georgia; do we now have to judge Bama entirely based on what we saw in this loss, or can we accept that week-to-week variance can bite even the best of teams?

USC is hardly the team that Alabama is right now, but it is significantly better than what it showed in Minneapolis. Plenty needed to go wrong on both sides of the ball for the 24-17 loss to come to fruition. Some of it is likely not fixable, but much of it should be. I stand by my assertion that this is a dangerous Minnesota team; I said before the game last week that I felt that the Gophers were uniquely equipped to attack the weaknesses of this USC squad and that I wouldn’t be surprised if they found a way to create real trouble. Minnesota came to play and delivered their best at home, while the Trojans showed up at close to their worst. And yet, this game was tied with less than a minute to go, with the Trojans perhaps just an inch away from stopping the Gophers’ eventual game-winner (though who really knows what happened in that goal line mosh pit). There are no moral victories to be had here -- the loss is an ugly one, and USC needs to do some serious soul searching to get itself right if it wants this season to end in anything that might be defined as a success. All the same, the sky hasn’t fallen just yet, and the window of opportunity remains for something to be salvaged of the year -- starting immediately against the undefeated Nittany Lions.

Following the loss, criticism of Lincoln Riley for leading his team to yet another late-game gut-punch against an inferior opponent abounds. For the most part, I think it’s justified. Good teams are the ones that find ways to win when things are tight, and we’ve now seen Riley’s group come up short a few times too many over the course of three years at USC. It’s fair to assign much of the blame for the team’s overall lack of focus and readiness from the start of this game on Riley, even if factors outside of his control like the travel distance contributed to it. As the head coach, the buck stops with you, and it’s on you to get your team ready to play ball, no matter the circumstance.

This USC team had done a good job of playing well in second halves prior to this game, a point to Riley’s credit, but that’s not enough. You’ve got to win the games period, and Riley has to find a way to get this team winning more of the ones it should.

With all of that said, I want to push back against some of the criticism of Riley’s play-calling and decision-making late in this game. People seem to have a hard time separating their preconceptions of the coach from the actual circumstances in acute examples, such as how the offense was managed in the last few drives of the game. The overwhelming criticism I’ve seen accuses Riley of being unable to stick with the run game and ascribes it to some underlying softness of his coaching style, mostly pointing to the pivotal interception early in the fourth quarter. Put plainly, I think that’s entirely unfair as an assessment of this particular game, even though I’ve been more than willing to criticize Riley’s aversion to late-game running in the past.

Against the Gophers, USC had been running the ball extremely well all game, and Riley had no problems continuing to do so into the second half. However, USC’s offensive line isn’t quite good enough to keep running the ball so effectively once defenses respond by overloading the box. On the previous touchdown drive, which was almost certainly the Trojans’ best of the day, five pass plays were called alongside seven runs, which kept the Gophers from keying on the run and made them pay when they did. On the interception drive, the Trojans had run the football on the final three consecutive plays before the third-and-4 interception. Though the first of those runs resulted in a first down by penalty, those rushes resulted in gains of 1, 5, and 1 yards as Minnesota began again to crowd the box in order to stop the ground attack. The Trojans were then left with a third-and-4, facing this alignment from Minnesota:

With eight guys up at the line of scrimmage and one-on-ones for USC’s talented receivers across the board, a pass here was the obvious call. It wasn’t as though the playcall didn’t account for the team’s troubles in pass protection either, as Miller Moss’ read here is designed to be made very quickly up at the top of the screen. The design works as intended as Duce Robinson starts to break free down the sideline on a slot fade and Moss gets into his throwing motion as soon as possible. Everything ends up falling apart because of the shocking speed with which Mason Murphy gets beat off the right edge; far faster than anyone should be expecting. The pressure gets to Moss hardly even one second after he takes the snap! You can’t plan for that; it’s just an egregious whiff. Murphy had a whole free man to help to his inside, yet he inexplicably allowed the edge to run right past his outside shoulder.

Everything here is designed and called right, but you just never expect a disaster of this magnitude. If you trust a player to play right tackle, you inherently have to trust them to survive for a second and a half with help to one side. Whether or not Riley should be trusting Murphy enough to start is another question, and I feel strongly that it’s a mistake to do so. Either way, this was the defining play of the evening, as even an incompletion would have set USC up for a field goal to make this a two-score game. The play call however was not wrong or misled. Sometimes, players just lose you games.

On that note, though, what doomed the Trojans in this game as well as in their prior loss to Michigan was turnovers. USC gave the ball away at two critical junctures against Minnesota, both times on the opponent’s side of the field on the edge of scoring range. The first was a fumble by Quinten Joyner at the end of a long run in the first half, while the latter was the 4th quarter pressure-turned-hit-turned-interception described earlier. Either or both of those opportunities resulting in even just a field goal leads to the complexion of this game feeling completely different.

The Trojans had been driving downfield smoothly each time, and it’s very likely that they would have scored touchdowns if the ball hadn’t been lost. The score of this game so easily could have been 27-10 or more by the time Minnesota touched the football for the first time in the 4th quarter, but that was not how it played out.

The arc of the Michigan game went very similarly, with the Trojans just barely losing the contest on a last-minute fourth-and-goal after a key sack-fumble and interception earlier in the game kept points off of the board. These turnovers have stung particularly badly because of the nature of USC’s opponents; run-heavy teams that bleed the time of possession and keep the Trojans from touching the ball as much as they’d like. As a result, each turnover represents far more of a wasted opportunity than it would in a high-flying Pac-12 contest like the ones of old. Given that this is the kind of game USC will find itself in regularly in its new conference and given the overall struggles of the offensive line, this team simply cannot afford to turn the ball over as it has in recent weeks. Over the last three games, the Trojans have turned the ball over seven times -- more than double their turnover rate over the first two seasons of the Lincoln Riley era. When divvying up blame for those turnovers, I attribute 2.5 to skill players (I put the Wisconsin interception on both Branch and Moss), 1.5 to Moss himself and 2 more on the offensive line.

The skill-player turnovers are the most avoidable and the ones that should be resolved most quickly. Moss’s turnovers result from his excess of aggression, but that’s in large part due to the situations his line puts him in, and he’s largely proven his judgment to be very sound. The offensive line itself shows itself to be the biggest contributor to the Trojans’ struggles in this area, unsurprisingly given that it seems to be the root of most of the offense’s main issues. So we return to the question -- how much better can they actually be?

Bad offensive line play exists along a spectrum. There’s the kind where you get your butt whipped up and down the field consistently, and then the kind where things are mostly fine, but the mistakes are backbreaking when they come.

In the first half of the Michigan game, we saw the former variety, as the Trojans offense seemingly could not put together a single working play as a result of Michigan’s total domination over the line of scrimmage. Since then, what we’ve seen has been far more of the latter, with a strong argument to be made that the good has gotten better with time. The most obvious component of that argument here is the vastly improved run blocking performance we saw in this contest, as the USC offensive line actually imposed its will on the Gophers throughout the night. In particular, the Trojans’ three interior players were very impressive in that regard, as each of Alani Noa, Jonah Monheim and Emmanuel Pregnon consistently managed to win their matchups and move the line of scrimmage downfield. As a result, the Trojans’ two lead backs finished the day having taken their 24 carries for 178 yards, at a fantastic clip of nearly 8 yards per carry. When you consider that Michigan's two lead backs managed under 5 yards per carry playing at home against the same Minnesota defense just the week before, it’s particularly promising.