Todd Orlando talks defensive install, first day of padded practice and more

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New USC defensive coordinator Todd Orlando has been waiting for this day for about seven months, since spring practice was cancelled after just one non-padded session and with the Trojans mandated by NCAA rules to go without full pads for their first four practices this month.

But on Wednesday afternoon, the Trojans will be full go -- and for Orlando, that means finally getting a true evaluation of his players.

"Big day today. I think the building's excited, I think everybody's excited because it's like, this is it. This is your resume to show that you're going to run as hard as you can for your teammates and you're going to hit somebody," he said Wednesday morning in a Zoom session with reporters. "And if you're not, you're going to be on the sidelines with us. I'm excited about it for today."

More to the point, he added later, "This is where the separation begins."

As frustrated as Orlando has surely been by spending the first eight and a half months of his tenure mostly off the the football field, or in limited individual field work in the month or so leading up to preseason camp, he struck a decidedly positive tone in reflecting back on it all.

In fact, he said he feels the Trojans have the majority of his defense installed already.

"We've installed 95 percent of the package, so really a credit to the players and the staff for the massive amount of work that they've done. Especially through these times in the last seven or eight months, they've done just a really good job," he said. "... We'll find out when the kids are out in the field by themselves, we'll just let them line up and go play and find out who can tackle people, who can get off blocks, who can separate. Because sometimes it gets a little bit skewed when you're doing thud period. So, big day today, excited about it, and ready to go this afternoon."

To that end, Orlando looked for a silver lining in the extra long leadup to this first padded practice.

The downside of being restricted to months and months of Zoom meetings, he said, is that for the guys who aren't so much visual learners as they are "walk and talk-it" learners, he wished he had the opportunity to pull them aside in the back of a meeting room and walk through a concept they were struggling to understand.

On the flip side, though, he thinks the extra time to get to know each other and for the players to establish a base understanding of the system before being put in a situation to succeed or flounder with it in practice could be beneficial.

"Eventually when you keep talking about the same thing it actually does process. And I just look at the last four days for us, and saying, man, these kids retained a decent amount of information," Orlando said. "So if we [jumped right into it in] the spring, we would have probably messed up a bunch of stuff and then maybe there would be a little bit of loss of confidence because we're trying to learn stuff and having an offense that's already had a year under their belt. It could have been -- I don't want to use the word bad -- but it could have been really a big learning curve for us.

"So having that extra time regardless of not being able to walk and talk and physically do it has been really, really good for us. I'm just telling you, when you're on there and you're like, 'We're going to go through Day 1 install,' and literally being able to do it seven or eight times and just keep pounding away and get into their brains, and I just judge it from our first day -- we're pretty sharp."

USC defensive tackles Brandon Pili and Marlon Tuipulotu also joined the Zoom call with reporters and offered their take on picking up the defense to this point.

"Like coach said, different people learn different ways. He said some people are hands-on learners, and I feel I'm more of a hands-on learner so as I'm starting to see the defense more and starting to run through it, I'm definitely getting the plays down better and it's helping me a lot more than just seeing it through Zoom," Pili said. "But now seeing the defense and linking plays and assignments, I think it's a lot easier now for me."

Added Tuipulotu: "I'm more of a hands-on learner too, but it was good to go over Zoom because we'd like meet every day and just go over the plays, so that was good to do. And once we got on the field it was pretty easy to actually go over our steps and plays. It was good."

With all that talk about the defensive install, Orlando said ultimately it's still about mastering the fundamentals. There will be additional wrinkles still to add in based on the next opponent, and the Trojans do want to come out out of this preseason with comfort level on the concepts and alignments required to execute Orlando's scheme fluidly.

But regardless, he said, it's still about base-level execution, and he's OK with there still be learning moments overall this next month.

"Remember, at the end of the day you're not going to trick everybody in terms of your scheme. You're going to be based on how hard you run to the football, how you get off blocks and how you tackle. That's the part that I'm excited about today because we have not seen it," he said.

"... We're trying to get to the point where it's we're installing stuff and now that the install's done it's just to go out there and play free. So I think sometimes as a coordinator, I've done this a long time, I think sometimes you get really conscientious. Guys, really good kids, which we have here, they want to do well, and sometimes it's like they want to please so much. It's like, 'Don't worry about that. Just got out there, put your foot in the ground and run as hard as you can and go hit somebody.' ... [We want to] try to free these guys up. It's okay to fail, man. That's what practice is about. Fail big. I'm going to fail big at times. But I'm gonna learn from it and I'm gonna go to the next play and I'm just gonna keep moving forward."

Orlando didn't want to get into too many specifics about individual players, especially before seeing them in a full-pad, full-tackle setting, but he did address some other general questions about the defense.

The linebacker situation

With Jordan Iosefa and Solomon Tuliaupupu out for the season with knee injuries, the Trojans are down two guys who were projected to fit somewhere on the depth chart at Mac linebacker (or middle linebacker). Iosefa looked like a favorite to get the first crack at the starting job there.

With those guys down, we wrote earlier this week that our expectation would be that junior Kana'i Mauga and sophomore Ralen Goforth would now be the two contenders for that position, with junior Palaie "EA" Gaoteote likely entrenched at the Rover linebacker position (the other inside LB spot in Orlando's defense).

And Orlando essentially confirmed that Wednesday.

"Yeah, they're working there. We're gonna try to keep EA as much as we can in the position that he played a little bit last year. But we're gonna work some guys around. Without getting real specific on it, those three guys have stood out to me," Orlando said. "They've got some pelts on the wall so they have experience. I will say this about all three of them, they're extremely sharp kids, I'm telling you. We have really strained them mentally and all those guys have picked up this package really, really well. So I'm excited to see how that shakes out, who ends up being the guys. But they're all gonna play. They do some really good things, but once again, we'll see after today's practice exactly where we're at."