With a couple days to reflect and digest everything that transpired in the Coliseum on Saturday -- you know, a USC football team actually playing like a USC football team -- we are back with the weekly First-and-10 breakdown.

The 10 most notable thoughts and takeaways we had from watching the Trojans demolish Rice, 66-14, in the season opener.

Unlike in recent years, it was hard to find a ton of criticisms so enjoy a more positive than usual look back on the Trojans' 2022 debut.

For all the relentless talk and hype about quarterback Caleb Williams since his transfer was first speculated at nine months ago, it was easy to lose sight of who Williams the football player was. Of course his praises have been sung and his merits have been spoken loudly -- everybody knows at this point that he’s one of the best quarterback talents in college football and an projected Heisman Trophy candidate. However, seeing is believing, and USC fans got to take in the entirety of what Williams is for the first time in a Trojans uniform.

What he is happens to be a potential first overall pick. There’s a long way to go, of course, and a lot can happen between now and April 2024, but near every trait the league looks for in a franchise signal-caller can be found in Williams’ game.

The first of these attributes is his top-shelf accuracy; there are only a handful of guys in college football who can put the ball exactly where they want the way that he does. Yesterday’s performance was an awesome reminder of that talent; the sophomore passed the ball 22 times and not a single one of them was misplaced in the slightest. Of those 22 throws, 19 were completed, one was a throw away, one was a dime to Mario Williams at the endzone sideline that would have been a touchdown with the receiver’s foot another inch inbounds and the other was a straight-up drop by Tahj Washington on a drag route not even four yards from the line of scrimmage.

His natural arm talent complements his accuracy, allowing him to hit off-platform throws with a rare degree of precision. On Saturday he was able to maintain excellent control over his passes even when throwing from unusual arm angles and on the move- most remarkably on a perfectly-placed scrambling completion to a well-covered Travis Dye at the sideline during the first quarter.

As a whole, Williams’ composure and command of the offense really stood out on the day. The quarterback seemed entirely in control of the game every time he was on the field; making the right reads, effortlessly maneuvering in the pocket and keeping himself out of harm’s way. That last bit is critical for effective dual-threat quarterbacks, both at this level and the next. Williams is adept at avoiding contact when he scrambles, wisely making his way out of bounds or to the ground before anyone has a chance to land a shot on him. He’s an electric runner of the football, though he’s not quite on the tier of speed and quickness of players like Lamar Jackson and Kyler Murray. Like them however, he does have an uncanny awareness of how to manipulate space and would-be tacklers, using his athleticism to elude and evade.

Now, put the package together and you’re left with a legitimate dual-threat at quarterback, something USC hasn’t seen in a long, long time. Admittedly, the Rice defense wasn’t much of a test. We all expected Williams to dominate and he did. However, the way he did it tracks with what’s there to see in his Oklahoma tape, so we know it translates to serious games against serious competition.

USC’s new quarterback is a special talent -- perhaps the most talented passer the Trojans have had on the team in a long, long time, and that’s saying something.

Suffice to say, it was a breath of fresh air to watch the Trojans offense run after more than half a decade under the previous regime. On a basic level, players executed well and avoided undue penalties for the most part; a distinct rarity in USC’s early season contests of late. Structurally, we knew this offense would be a juggernaut. The efficacy of Lincoln Riley’s offensive designs and playcalling has been well proven over the previous years. With that said, it was a welcome sight to see how evident those factors were in the Trojans’ first outing with Riley at the helm.

On an individual level, there were numerous examples of intelligently designed plays; my favorite may have been the WR reverse to Mario Williams off of a faked guard-tackle counter. However, what stood out to me was the sequencing and layering of these concepts through the course of the game, often building upon previous plays to set up mismatches and to manipulate the defense into creating openings. We saw an example of this on the very first drive, with Jordan Addison running a couple of hard-cut slants to get the defense to shade inside before the Trojans reached the goal line. Addison then began to break inside on what appeared to be another slant, before snapping the route back outwards on a whip pattern to shake the defender and secure an easy 6.

Throughout the game, the Trojans set up play-action opportunities with the run game, running the same concepts and simulated blocking movements to catch the defense off guard. Those same looks were also used to set up the read option game, causing the defense to leave Caleb Williams unattended as a runner. It wasn’t rocket science, but it was smart, effective play-calling.

Once again, Rice may not have been much of a test, but it was good to see the offense’s dynamism and ability to build on itself. It may not really have mattered yesterday, but against tougher competition those elements can be the margin that determines the outcome of a game.