Unranked USC ‘upset’ No. 3 Utah, just like the stats predicted

Unranked USC beat No. 3 Utah, 42-24, in an upset that wasn’t Saturday night. Surprised by the margin? Fair. Surprised by the result? You shouldn’t be.

The third-ranked team doesn’t often lose to unranked teams, so it was a surprise to see that No. 3 Utah had opened as a 3-point underdog against unranked, 3-3 USC. That line ballooned to 6.5 points by Saturday morning, which is shocking in a sport based so much on resume rankings.

Let an oddsmaker explain why, via the Los Angeles Times:

People think this is a tailspin for USC, but I don’t see it as a tailspin. They just need to stabilize a bit. They have the No. 1 recruiting class, NFL talent all over the roster. All it takes is the coaches to say the right things and to put the guys in the right spots, and that team can play with anyone in the country.

Utah had the resume to back up its No. 3 ranking, with wins over Michigan, Oregon, Arizona State and Cal, but aside from what the oddsmakers said, there was reason to believe USC is better than Utah. At least, there was reason to believe the Trojans could beat the Utes at home.

The numbers don’t see wins and losses, and they don’t see controversy. They don’t know that USC just fired coach Steve Sarkisian, and they don’t know how bad the Trojans’ loss to Washington really looked. They don’t have the biases we do, as we tend to put way too much influence on outside factors, like Sarkisian’s firing. The numbers simply know that USC racks up yards in bunches on offense, tends to make plays on defense and has home field advantage. Oddsmakers took advantage of how much the outside factors are disproportionately valued over the numbers.

The numbers know Utah is pretty good, too, but they don’t over-value the Utes’ wins. And that’s why the S&P+ ratings had USC, with home field advantage, beating Utah by 5.6 points, with a 62.7 percent chance of winning.

Despite the stereotype we’ve seemingly come up with for USC -- that the Trojans will flounder in big games and can’t catch up to the country’s elite -- this is a truly talented team. That’s backed up by the numbers, even if we don’t see it in the human polls just yet. USC is currently ranked 15th in the F/+ ratings, and it could jump all the way to the top 10 this week.

USC really shouldn’t have three losses. Choose your narrative as to why the Trojans have those losses, but the stats would say they’ve just been plain unlucky. And after this beatdown, it would be smart to trust those stats.

At 4-3, the Trojans probably aren’t going to jump into the human polls just yet, but they’re likely to get back there eventually. USC should be favored over all five of its remaining opponents -- at Cal, vs. Arizona, at Colorado, at Oregon, vs. UCLA. It might lose some of those games, sure. That’s how win probability works. But the Trojans have the talent to do it.

And more than just the talent, they have a coach that trusts the very stats that trust his team. Interim coach Clay Helton twice chose to go for it on fourth-and-goal at the 1-yard line, once while trailing and once while leading. That’s what the stats say to do, but coaches often choose the “safe” route of kicking a field goal.

Even against the advice of the announcers, who said that it would be better for “momentum” to kick the field goal, Helton made the smart move, and he was rewarded with 14 points.

Don’t call this an upset. The team that made the smart decisions, and the team that should have won, did. The rankings could tell you Utah had more quality wins than USC, but they certainly didn’t know which team would be better in Los Angeles.