The last Stanford-USC game was a pounding. On Sept. 9 in Los Angeles, the Trojans won a 42-24 final that was just as lopsided as the score suggested. They put up 8.4 yards per play (623 total) and punted one time all night. Stanford’s offense was fine, but the Cardinal defense couldn’t stop Sam Darnold and friends from taking what they wanted.
USC beat up on Stanford 11 weeks ago. Here’s how the Cardinal can make the Pac-12 title rematch different
The Cardinal shouldn’t be as bad as they were last time.
Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports
The teams play again Friday for the Pac-12 championship (8 p.m. ET, ESPN). The Trojans are 4-point favorites and have a 54 percent chance to win, per S&P+ projections.
Stanford doesn’t have to change everything. Some things worked really well for the Cardinal in the first USC meeting.
Bryce Love and the Cardinal running game need to keep cooking, for sure. They weren’t the problem last time, when Love ran for 160 yards on 17 carries. That included a 75-yard TD on which Stanford’s line created a preposterous hole for Love to go through:
Love is Stanford’s star, and Stanford won’t beat USC if he isn’t great. The Cardinal have lost a couple of games in which Love’s been awesome, but they haven’t won one when he hasn’t been.
Stanford did plenty of other good stuff in the last game. The Cardinal fumbled once but recovered it, and Keller Chryst didn’t get picked off. The Stanford D intercepted Darnold twice, both before the game was a rout.
But Stanford needs to do better in a bunch of areas.
The run game could use to be more efficient, not just explosive.
Stanford’s Rushing Success Rate — a measure of how well the Cardinal stayed on schedule — was a lousy 33 percent in the first game. The numbers were good overall because of some huge Love carries, but it’d be better not to be so hit-or-miss this time.
Stanford needs to bother Darnold at least a little bit.
Stanford sacked him once for a loss of 1 yard the last time, and Darnold didn’t have any problem distributing the ball. He was 21-of-26 passing for 316 yards, with a Passing Success Rate of 67 percent. That’s huge; the national average is 40 percent. The two interceptions Darnold threw weren’t good, but they didn’t matter much.
Stanford’s third-down defense has to be miles better.
The good news is that simple regression to the mean should make that easy. The Trojans were a silly 10-of-12 on third downs in the September game. But they aren’t anything special on third downs in general, with a season-long conversion rate of 42 percent. They’re a combined 6-of-24 in their last two games, which is terrible.
Stanford’s defense has had problems defending third downs all year, and maybe those’ll continue. The Cardinal are 103rd in third-down conversion rate against, giving them up 44 percent of the time. But it seems like 10-of-12 shouldn’t happen again, right?
The pick
Stanford should play a better game than it did last time, in part because this isn’t a road game and in part because Stanford just isn’t likely to repeat something that bad. The game’s even in Santa Clara, which is far closer to Palo Alto than L.A.
The Cardinal looked iffy for a while in November. Their 3-1 stretch against Oregon State, Washington State, Washington, and Cal included a couple of tepid performances. But they were great against Notre Dame last week, especially in the fourth quarter. I think they’ll be great again on Friday and win the Pac-12.
Stanford 35, USC 31
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