LAS VEGAS — As Utah tight end Thomas Yassmin was rumbling down the sideline, there was only one man to beat. USC safety Calen Bullock seemed to understand, so he positioned himself in front of the Ute and got low to try to tackle the 6-foot-5 Yassmin.
But few among the sold-out crowd of 61,195 at Allegiant Stadium expected Bullock to make the tackle, the way the Pac-12 championship game was going. Sure enough, Yassmin easily pulled his legs out of Bullock’s grasp as he finished his trip to the end zone.
It was the back-breaking score in No. 11 Utah’s 47-24 win over No. 4 USC, but not the last touchdown the Utes would score in a 23-point fourth quarter. It might not have even been the most egregious display of tackling on the night from USC.
You just as easily could have led this story with Money Parks’ 57-yard touchdown catch, in which USC safety Lattrel McCutchin attempted to strip the ball without making an effort to tackle before he collided with linebacker Eric Gentry, freeing Parks for his casual sprint.
Or, really, you could have gone with any of USC’s 24 missed tackles Friday, per Pro Football Focus, somehow surpassing the 18 misses from the Trojans’ first loss to the Utes in October. Or any of the 533 yards yielded by USC.
“I felt like we were in position a lot defensively tonight,” USC head coach Lincoln Riley said. “At the end of the game, we got way too focused, we panicked a little bit, got way too focused on trying to strip the ball or trying to make big plays as opposed to just getting them on the ground.”
If this was a one-game aberration in a season of fine defending, it would be easy to move on and focus on what bowl game USC will play in after being eliminated from College Football Playoff contention (here’s guessing the Cotton Bowl).
But this was part of a yearlong trend for USC. Which leads to questions about how the Trojans fix this moving forward.
Riley and defensive coordinator Alex Grinch inherited arguably the worst defense in USC history when they arrived from Oklahoma a year ago. It was never going to be a one-year fix. And in some areas, most notably turnovers, USC made significant progress.
But if there were any games in which USC felt like an adequate tackling team, it was an outlier during this 11-2 campaign. As Riley noted, much of the time the Trojans were in the right place. They just didn’t have the personnel capable of bringing ball carriers to the ground.
As Riley began his roster build a year ago, offense was the clear early priority. As he added Caleb Williams, Mario Williams, Travis Dye, Austin Jones, Brenden Rice and Terrell Bynum, players like linebacker Shane Lee and cornerback Mekhi Blackmon felt like outliers. It wasn’t until after spring practices that the likes of Eric Gentry, Solomon Byrd and Bryson Shaw were added.
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USC can’t afford to take that approach this offseason. Defense must be the priority, especially with the Trojans’ best defender, lineman Tuli Tuipulotu, eligible to enter the NFL draft and the likes of Lee and Ralen Goforth entertaining the same idea.
“All parts of it,” Riley said Friday when asked which area of the roster needs to take the next step. “There’s going to be a lot of changes. That’s college football this day and age. We understand that. The guys we have in the locker room now that are with us next year, we know what our mission is. It’s to be in that same locker room and feel a whole hell of a lot different than we do right now. We’ll bring in a couple of pieces that are going to help us on that journey.”