USC’s Riley: Expectations may have affected us

LOS ANGELES — The sights and sounds were all too familiar for USC.

A slumping Caleb Williams mustered a slight wave to the Coliseum fans who couldn’t hide their disappointment. A throng of Utah players jeered the home crowd as they ran off the field in victory. And Lincoln Riley sat alone at the podium trying to explain how, for the third time in three games, Utah had once again beaten USC — this time on a field goal in the final seconds that gave the Utes a 36-34 win.

“Two tough losses in a row and obviously not how any of us scripted this, but you can’t script it. It’s college football,” Riley said. “It comes down to little things here and there, and we haven’t quite played clean enough here in the last couple of weeks to take advantage of it.”

Much like he did after the loss to Notre Dame last week, Riley defended his team’s fight and chalked up the loss to a combination of mistakes and shortcomings by every USC unit against a tough opponent.

But the Utes have proved to be more than just a tough matchup. They have become a particularly impossible riddle for Riley and Co. to solve — an unofficial marker of how much work USC still has to do to become what it hopes to be.

On Saturday, despite having far less talent on the field than USC and being without starting quarterback Cameron Rising, the Utes’ identity and collective force was once again too much for the Trojans to handle. Whittingham’s team didn’t do any one thing spectacularly, instead wearing USC down with a steady offense and its customary stout defense.

USC, on the other hand, fell into some familiar traps once again. Even after making some changes to the offensive line following the six-sack loss to Notre Dame — shifting Mason Murphy to right guard and Jarett Kingston to right tackle while benching Florida transfer Michael Tarquin — the line might have looked improved, but the offense looked nearly as rhythmless as it did in South Bend.

Williams threw for only 256 yards and didn’t have a touchdown throw after starting off the season with 23 touchdowns in seven games. While Utah’s Sione Vaki collected 217 all-purpose yards on his own, USC produced just 145 rushing yards on the night. The Utes, who had the 55th-ranked offense in SP+ coming into the game, outgained the Trojans’ third-ranked offense by 81 yards and held the ball for nearly 10 minutes more.

Defensively, the Trojans reverted to bad habits at inopportune moments, missing a few key tackles and allowing players such as Vaki and quarterback Bryson Barnes to engineer big plays. Barnes’ 23-yard rush with less than a minute left in the game was the backbreaker that set up the game-winning field goal.

Riley, who didn’t make any players available to the media after the loss, said he felt like last year’s team, which went 11-1 in the regular season, might have overachieved. He said this year’s team might have been affected by the expectations that have followed.

“Everybody expects you to be good. Everybody expects that you can have a championship-caliber team,” Riley said. “And when you’re constantly trying to live up to those expectations, you can kind of fall away from maybe what puts you there in that position in the first place.”

When asked about those expectations and whether USC has fallen short of them this season, Riley said the team has had to “fight to keep things on our terms.”

“We don’t come in every single week talking about winning a national championship, going to the playoffs,” Riley said. “I don’t know where that narrative starts. … If you let the outside set expectations, you’re always being measured up against that.”

As he has done after both close victories and losses, Riley reiterated that USC still has plenty to play for. Though its College Football Playoff chances might have evaporated after Saturday, the Trojans still have only one conference loss, making a trip back to the Pac-12 title game possible.

But after Saturday’s loss, it will take some work for USC to do that, given that matchups against Oregon, Washington and UCLA await and a second conference loss will likely seal its fate.

“It’s not coach speak, it’s not trying to create something that’s not there,” Riley said. “There is a real opportunity for this team right now and this team can do it. Now we got to play better. We got to play cleaner, we got to coach better.”

If Riley’s debut season was a display of USC’s potential, then the second year has been a dose of reality that it will, indeed, take some time and growing pains to reach said potential. Riley might push back against outside expectations and hope his players ignore them but in the same breath acknowledge that they aren’t going away.

If anything, after a stretch like this, they will only ramp up.

“We’re not going anywhere,” Riley said. “We signed up to do this thing for a long time.”