Where does USC go from here with its struggling secondary?

After an incoherent start to the season for the USC secondary, the defensive coordinator was held in front of a group of cameras and did not chop words. There were too many cover busts leading too many big passing passes, he said. He planned to spend the week in Bye studying the film with a microscopic concentration in the hope of understanding exactly what had been wrong.

“Lowlights cannot be so low,” he said. “You can’t just say it happens sometimes. These things can’t happen.”

This coordinator was Alex Grinch, speaking in September 2023. Six weeks later, he was dismissed.

The circumstances are not entirely disastrous for the defense of the Trojans – or the successor of Grinch, Anton Lynn – in October 2025. But the problems with the games of large passes have persisted since then. In fact, they were worse this season that under the previous Coordinator of the USC, despite the fact that the USC has not yet played an offense at the top-40.

For five games, the USC abandoned 51 games of 10 or more yards. It is eighth worst in the country, equivalent to an average of more than 10 of these games per game. And against Illinois, this propensity to allow explosive games returned to bite the USC in a brutal loss.

“The defense of passes must improve,” said USC coach Lincoln Riley after the match. “It was just not good enough.”

Two days later, when they were asked for the state of his secondary school, Riley took a more encouraging tone. The cornerbacks, he said, “had some mistakes here and there.” Take the two biggest passes in the match from the equation, he added, and “it’s going to be really difficult for them to fight.”

The question of whether his corners have the same confidence in leaving the loss could be another question. The way they react this week bye, with key clashes against Michigan and Notre Dame to come, could finally determine the course of the USC season.

“Confidence, you can’t simulate this,” said Riley. “We do enough good things for this to present itself and that there should be confidence in this, but if we continue to make some of the errors that we have made, whether it is a burst cover, or as not to take advantage of football – they are controllable on us. Other people do not even have to play in this way.”

Three consecutive moments in the second semester of last Saturday were directly correlated to the paralyzing errors of the defensive backs of the USC. A swing pass from Illinois in the third quarter experienced a score of 64 yards after the Fitzgerald Safety Bishop took a bad angle on the ball carrier Justin Feagin, and two corners in the region did not manage to lose blocks. Then, in the fourth quarter, another corner half, Braylon Conley, was burned twice on explosive passing games – first, when he was beaten for a touch on an inclination in the middle, then, on the possession that followed, when he fell by defending a coupling road that exploded for 61 yards.

Most of the group’s most flagrant errors on the big games this season have been allocated to communication failures. These problems were only exacerbated last week in the absence of security Kamari Ramsey, who had recently resumed the relay calls of the secondary of secondary school line.

Ramsey is expected to come back next week, but Riley said this week that defense communication was a main objective for the USC.

For Fitzgerald, the week of leave was an opportunity to “completely reset everything” in secondary school.

“It’s really about focusing more on the same things and trying to do it as a whole,” said Fitzgerald. “As a defense, if 10 guys do one thing but a person does the bad thing, it’s a broken game. We cannot afford it. So we just try to put everyone on the same wavelength.”

While Trojan horses enter the most difficult section of their schedule, it is not clear that the coaches will trust the corner in the future.

The injuries at the start of the season deprived the USC of two of his most experienced corner half, Prophet Brown and Chasen Johnson. Then last week, while the USC secondary collapsed in the defeat against Illinois, the senior Redsirt Decarlos Nicholson was in and out of the alignment with what seemed to be a nagging ischin.

Nicholson, however, was the most coherent cover in the USC at five weeks. In front of him, the recruit of Redshirt, Marcelles Williams, started the last three games, but has in no case smoked work.

The Senior Harvey DJ was brought from the transfer portal to be a major contributor to Corner, but he is far from these expectations. He only played five snaps last Saturday, despite the disastrous depth of the Corner team, but one of these games led to a devastating passing of passing interference on the winning disc of Illinois.

“We are quite young on the perimeter right now, without having the Prophet and Chasen,” said Riley. “We need [Harvey’s] experience to present yourself. His emergence in this next phase of the season will be important to us, and he will have every opportunity to do so. »»

The most uncertain secondary place has been in the slit, where Riley has not yet found a replacement capable of Brown. But the USC could have an answer on the way in the form of the real recruit Alex Graham.

Graham was a star start during the USC pre-season camp, but he has been on the shelf since. The coaches suggested that he could return next week against Michigan and potentially enter an important role right away in the niche, where, at this stage, the USC relied on Ramsey playing out of position.

There is not much depth in the defensive back so that the USC mire after that. The real recruit RJ Sermons was one of the most coveted corner prospects in America, when it reclassified in the spring to register for the USC a year earlier.

Riley has not excluded the possibility that sermons, who should be a high school student, can play an essential role in the section. He said that the USC “pushed him” with him and Graham in the hope that they would be ready “earlier than late”.

“These are two guys who are quite talented to contribute to us right now,” said Riley. “You are just on a race against time to prepare them, to pump as many representatives in these guys. Because they clearly have the capacity.”

In any case, it will take more than two real first -year students to stabilize the secondary of the USC. The most urgent question now, after a suspicious start this season, is whether the rest of the group is able to put the ship from here.

“A match does not define them as a player, does not define us as a defense,” said Christian Pierce. “We just keep the head high and put the best foot forward.”