The USC Trojans took on the Arizona State Sun Devils on Saturday night in a matchup in which they were favored by more than four scores. But the team struggled a bit, with star quarterback Caleb Williams playing his worst game of the season, and head coach Lincoln Riley had a particularly blunt assessment of their peroformance
During his postgame press conference on Saturday, Lincoln Riley made it clear that he thought his team was “a little off” during Saturday’s game.
“You get on the road and everything’s just magnified a little bit,” Riley said postgame. “And we were just, we were just a little off, you know, especially offensively in terms of moving, the play clock going down on us a lot. And we did not handle that well, so we’ll have to do a better job preparing the guys for that.”
Riley chalked up the brutal performance to some defensive penalties as well as just the general difficulty of playing on the road in college football.
“And then we had a couple of untimely penalties defensively that really put them out, some of the holes that we were putting them in because we were in so many negative plays,” Riley said.
“And so we’ve got to be better than that. I mean, listen, it’s challenging and there’s a reason why 70% of the time the home team wins in college football and it’s been like that forever and ever. So we know we’re gonna have to get better at it without any more road challenges.”
We’ll have to see if the Trojans perform better next week.