Ackerman: Fired-Up USC has 'the Juice'

Ackerman: Fired-Up USC has ‘the Juice’

The Trojans’ energy in Week 5 showed they want the smoke of whatever comes their way

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Posted on December 8, 2020


  By Nathan Ackerman of Dash Sports TV for SuperWest Sports

Coming into USC’s Week 5’s matchup with Washington State—known universally as the only Sunday Night Football game that mattered this week—I braced for a pretty sloppy game of football.

I thought it would be about as “Pac-12 football” as Pac-12 football can get.

usc logo I thought the Trojans, though clearly the better team, would contribute to this sloppiness, particularly on the offensive side. They hadn’t played a game in 14 days and had missed myriad practices leading up to Sunday. I expected a slow-starting, low-scoring ballgame that featured out-of-sync, inefficient offenses.

At least as it pertains to USC, I was wrong. Very, very wrong. In all my speculation as to how the team’s coronavirus outbreak and subsequent game and practice cancellations would affect it on the field, I forgot one thing, perhaps the single most important factor in football:

This team has the juice.

What exactly is “the juice,” you might ask? I sure as hell don’t know. But USC has it.

With the Coliseum completely closed to fans, anyone sitting in the press box Sunday night could hear each team’s bench quite clearly for the entire game.

And unless the cardboard cutouts in the stands behind USC’s bench pulled some Frankenstein type stunt and came to life around kickoff—which very well might be the most terrifying thing I can possibly imagine and will likely be the source of my nightmares for the next seven years—all that noise was coming from the Trojans.

The Trojans celebrate a touchdown vs. WSU. | Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images

But this wasn’t just once USC had built a 28-point lead in the first quarter, and it wasn’t just when the lead was half that large. It was right from the opening horn. The Trojans were having an absolute party, and it translated to the field.

Olaijah Griffin putting on dance moves after a big play is nothing new, but the whole defense joining him after his first career interception like they’d been waiting for that moment for two years was a glorious sight to behold. The hollers and chirps grew louder and louder after each touchdown, even when the game was all but over.

At some point, a USC running back gave a WSU defender a slight hit stick and turned a 1- or 2-yard run into a 3- or 4-yard one. Intentionally, that description was non-thrilling, because the play was as well. I say “USC running back” because I can’t even remember which it was, and the play doesn’t show up in highlights reels because it wasn’t that massive a hit and USC was already up by at least four possessions.

But that’s my point.

I briefly glanced over at the sideline after the play, and the whole bench reacted as if the WSU defender had turned into Flat Stanley, resulting in a 60-yard touchdown to tie the game in the closing minute of regulation.

One player was running in wide circles with his arms out like a 10-year-old disguising as an airplane, another was rapidly high-stepping in place and everyone was making the same OHHHHHH sound exuded from NBA arenas when a point guard puts a 7-footer on a poster.

That’s the kind of energy that allows a team which hasn’t played in two weeks and has hardly practiced during that span to come out of the gate with less rust than stainless steel and put teams to sleep when they’ve hardly woken up. It’s also the kind of energy required to pull off the types of comebacks USC did against Arizona State and Arizona, particularly the former.

Frankly, it’s the kind of energy that makes me gawk when I hear someone say USC is “too scared” to play Colorado with a trip to the Pac-12 Championship Game on the line instead of UCLA in Week 6.

To be honest, I don’t quite know whether I’d like to see USC play its scheduled rivalry game or whether I want the undefeated teams to take a stab at each other for the chance to represent the South division against whatever trash heap emerges from the landfill of the North. There are appealing arguments both ways, and neither hill I’ll die on.

What I do know, however, is that the argument that USC doesn’t want to play Colorado because it prefers to continue being coddled by the Pac-12 (or so the baseless accusation goes) is straight up asinine, even aside from the obvious fact that USC doesn’t make the schedule in the first place.

A wise man (and it wasn’t Zach Wilson) once said: “Any team, time, place.” And that’s what USC will do. Watch the Washington State game again, but this time, watch the sidelines. Watch the dance parties. Watch the chirping, watch the hollers.

Through your observation, one thing will be made very, very clear: This team wants all the smoke.

You can watch Ackerman’s companion Trojan Dash Sports Talk Show on Dash Sports TV, and read his other work at the Daily Trojan.