In a conference full of surprises every season, there aren’t too many things that you can be certain about when it comes to foreseeing how Pac-12 football shakes out. But if you had to make a safe prediction — if such a thing exists in this chaotic conference — your best bet would be to say that the outcome of a Stanford-USC game will come down to the final possession.
That will likely again be the case when No. 13 Stanford (1-0) hosts No. 14 USC (1-0) tomorrow in one of the biggest early-season matchups of 2014, a game that will serve as an important litmus test for both teams after an uninformative Week 1. At stake for the Cardinal is their reputation as the owners of the longest home winning streak in the country, while the Trojans look to prove why the media should hold off on its coronation of UCLA as the Pac-12 South champions.
But for Stanford, it’s disingenuous to deny that there isn’t an extra element of revenge involved. Even though last year’s season ended with a berth in the 100th Rose Bowl Game, the bitter taste of being knocked out of the national championship conversation by an archrival — against whom Stanford held a four-game winning streak at the time — still lingers. And with last year’s feud between Stanford head coach David Shaw and USC head coach Steve Sarkisian apparently over on the surface but an almost certain talking point in the coming years, you get two of the most intriguing Pac-12 headlines from last season combined in one game Saturday.
If Stanford football has shown anything in the last five years, it’s that the team has a short memory and knows how to respond to losses. Since 2009, Stanford has never lost to the same team in back-to-back season except for Oregon in 2010 and 2011.
“Rivalries are created when you go back-and-forth and they’re fun, exciting games to watch,” said head coach David Shaw. “And that’s what you see between us and USC.”
One of the most important matchups on Saturday will pit the talented Cardinal offensive line against a scary Trojans front seven headlined by perhaps the best defensive player in the country in defensive lineman Leonard Williams. Shaw isn’t the only person who has been effusive in his praise for Williams, as many NFL analysts are projecting him to be the overall No. 1 pick in the 2015 NFL Draft. In addition to Williams, fourth-year starter inside linebacker Hayes Pullard led the Trojans last year with a team-high 93 tackles while safety Su’a Cravens was named to multiple freshman All-American first teams. USC might be thin on the defensive line with the loss of defensive tackle Kenny Bigelow, but its first eleven players on defense are as talented as any squad in the nation.
While each Stanford lineman certainly held his own against UC-Davis, the unit as a whole seemed disjointed and sloppy at times. The Cardinal O-line took two holding penalties last week, an anomaly when considering that the unit only took three all of last season. Not a single offensive lineman looked happy after the UC-Davis game, and offensive coordinator Mike Bloomgren remarked how impressed he was with the young unit’s willingness to clean up the sloppiness without even a word from the coaches.
“All season, all summer, [the offensive line] had so many goals and high expectations for ourselves that we want to accomplish,” said junior center Graham Shuler. “When we don’t match that right way, which I don’t think we did for UC-Davis, that’s something we’re really excited about fixing moving forward. The attitude in our offensive line room was a tad bit frustrated, but we were way more interested in moving forward in how we can fix it and what we need to do to adjust to be as efficient as possible.”
The other battle in the trenches, between the Stanford defensive line and the USC offensive line, has the potential to go in the Cardinal’s favor. The Trojans have experience at the two most important positions on the O-line, with junior Max Tuerk starting at center and redshirt sophomore Chad Wheeler at left tackle, but they are also starting a pair of true freshmen at the two guard positions.
Perhaps the biggest surprise on the Trojans’ depth chart is the humungous size of some of the linemen. Right tackle Zach Banner is 6-foot-9 and 350 pounds, and right guard Damien Mama is somehow even bulkier with his 6-foot-5, 370-pound frame. For the sake of comparison, Cardinal left tackle Andrus Peat is 6-foot-7 and 316 pounds, which is closer to the prototypical size of an NFL lineman. The Cardinal front seven may be able to use its quickness off the snap to blow by the huge but slower USC linemen, an apparent advantage that fifth-year senior defensive end Henry Anderson wasn’t afraid to share with the media earlier in the week.
“I think if we work edges on the big guys, we’ll be able to do some big damage there,” Anderson said. “We can get after the 370-pound guy a bit because he’s a lot bigger — he still moves pretty well for someone his size, but there are some things we can do to get [into the backfield].”
Anderson was also quick to praise USC running back Javorius Allen, who he thinks will be the best tailback Stanford faces all year. Allen had a stellar game against Fresno State last week with 133 rushing yards, but it was quarterback Cody Kessler who stole the show by going 25-of-37 passing for 394 yards and four touchdowns on top of running a Pac-12 record 105 plays. Not many Stanford fans have forgotten how Kessler managed to burn Stanford’s defense in the first half at the Coliseum last year with his short, accurate passes as well as his scrambling ability.
Similar to how senior quarterback Kevin Hogan promised that the Cardinal offense will reveal some new wrinkles on Saturday, Stanford’s defense should see a few unexpected plays from the Trojans offense.
“It’s going to be big this week to stop [USC’s] offense before they start get started,” Anderson said. “We kind of had the same plan against Oregon in the past few years, trying to get those three-and-outs early so that the offense doesn’t get into the up-tempo offense they like to do.”
If there’s one quote that best sums up the Stanford-USC rivalry, it belongs to USC safety Su’a Cravens, who earlier in the week said, “There’s just something about Stanford that puts a fire in my stomach.”
Tomorrow’s showdown is slated for a 12:30 p.m. PDT kickoff time, with national television coverage on ABC.
Contact George Chen at gchen15 ‘at’ stanford.edu.