LOS ANGELES — They wasted Caleb Williams. Again.
For a few minutes, after resolve crumbled at the end of a 52-42 loss to Washington Saturday night, perhaps the most famous collegiate football player in America was simply a kid who’d lost a ballgame. He hopped up into the stands, postgame, resting his helmeted head on his mother Dayna Price’s shoulder, shoulders shaking as she covered his face with a paper sign to shield TV cameras that held and zoomed on heartbreak. He slumped at the back of the postgame presser, sitting on the floor with his back against the wall out of view before eventually standing, trudging over to lean into the mic when asked about his emotional state.
“I want to go home and cuddle with my dog,” Williams said, “and watch some shows.”
There was no life in the room, any hint of adrenaline drained, reality cold and unforgiving. Williams is one of the greatest quarterbacks in collegiate football history: he also may end his two years at USC without a national championship, without a College Football Playoff appearance, without as much as a Pac-12 title. He turned in another generational game in a guns-ablaze shootout with Washington’s Michael Penix Jr. Saturday, line about as perfect as you could ask for in a pivotal conference game: 27-of-35, 312 passing yards, four total touchdowns.
It wasn’t enough. Because superhuman has never been quite enough, not to lift this deeply flawed program with all its fight and hunger past the failings of a defense that got shredded to bits yet again by the Huskies. When Williams crumpled in the fourth quarter on a third-down sack, down three and an attempt to match Washington unsuccessful, the night was already over, because any semblance of trust in a USC defense to get a stop had been carved to shreds. Washington entered Saturday ranked 117 of 130 FBS teams in rushing yards per game at 102; running back Dillon Johnson somehow ran for 256, an incomprehensible number, a kid who’d never run for more than 100 in his career.
“I mean, obviously wasn’t good enough,” head coach Lincoln Riley said of USC’s run defense. “I mean, not by any stretch of the imagination.”
Everyone with half a brain, in a game featuring two defenses with gaping holes and two unrelenting offenses, expected a ludicrous point total between Trojans and Huskies. But you couldn’t have expected the speed. Realization quickly set in, by intermission of a breakneck circus act with 601 first-half yards and nine scores, that the ol’ whoever-gets-a-stop winning adage wouldn’t apply. No, this game would hinge on whoever-messes-up-last.
The two signal-callers whipped three-minutes-or-less drives back and forth throughout the first half, Williams looking as sharp and cool as he’d been for weeks, Penix Jr. cycling through progressions in rapid-fire time to dissect wide-open holes in an inept USC secondary.
On a 3rd-and-1 on USC’s first drive, Williams beat a defender to the edge, then 360-degree-juked a Washington defender out of his shoes; a few drives later, Penix Jr. produced one of the highlights of the season, flinging a dart while falling out of bounds that somehow zipped past a thicket of USC defensive backs into the waiting arms of tight end Devin Culp.
Later in the second quarter, in a stroke of brilliance by Riley, Williams handed off to Zachariah Branch, who took a few steps — stopped — and pivoted to pitch back to Williams, who hit a lick-his-fingers open Tahj Washington for a touchdown in a play that looked like kids drawing in the mud with sticks in the backyard. Not to be outdone, Penix Jr. calmly carved up USC’s defense like an early Thanksgiving turkey, finishing off a drive with a laser TD pass to Ja’lynn Polk that he caught so anticlimactically he almost seemed bored.
The first blemish, though, came when Williams, who’s struggled at times with holding onto the ball, tried for a little too long to extend a play at the end of the first half and was stripped — setting up Washington for a short touchdown that felt titanic, giving the Huskies a 35-28 lead and the ball back after the half in a game where USC’s downtrodden defense seemed unworthy of any trust to get one stop, let alone two.
But for the second straight game, linebacker Eric Gentry took advantage of the opportunity. After falling down the depth chart for much of the year, he had a breakout against Cal, and with his lanky reach tipped a third-quarter pass from Penix Jr. into a diving Christian Roland-Wallace’s arms.
And Williams wasted little time bouncing back, trying for a QB keeper on a 4th-and-1 only to think better of it, spin away from a lineman and spiral a 25-yarder to Brenden Rice in the end zone for approximately his 1,547th how-in-the-world act of magic on the night.
But for the rest of the night, USC’s defense couldn’t swat a fly, in a game that felt like the bottom falling out after a year of increasing pressure on coordinator Alex Grinch. There was no possible explanation for what transpired here, how this Washington team more than tripled its average output on the ground, gaps looking like craters and tacklers consistently nowhere in position. Johnson didn’t steamroll; he simply ran through open space, time and time again.
“Wasn’t much to say,” linebacker Mason Cobb said, simply, when asked about Grinch’s message postgame.
Here’s what can be said: this program, when looking at simple results across two seasons, has continued to waste Williams.
