USC vs. Missouri State
August 30, 2025 at 4:35pm
Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, Los Angeles, CA:  (62,841 of 77,500)
Total Time: 3 hours 16 minutes

USC vs. Georgia Southern
September 7, 2025 at 4:35pm
Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, Los Angeles, CA:  (66,514 of 77,500)
Total Time: 3 hours 35 minutes

So yeah, another season and I’m back out here making compromises again. It would’ve been nice to have completed a post last week, but here we are with me combining the past two games into one former FCS showdown post. On top of that, I’m mostly going to be offense focused here since that’s more of my expertise and I don’t have time to run all these analyses on both sides of the ball. So you’ll get half the posts and half the content, giving you the same experience as the average grocery store these days. Don’t get offended.

Missouri State may have joined the FBS just this year and Georgia Southern has barely managed a decade at this level, but you only have to look around the nation to see what could have happened. Last week, FCS teams Austin Peay and Tarleton State picked up some FBS wins and North Dakota only lost by 3 after a late touchdown by Kansas St. At the end of the day, USC is 2-0. That being said, you really can’t really tell much except they’re not bad enough to lose these cupcake games.

We’ll focus on some of the positives first. It’s not often you can just sub out the entire team for the whole second half like in the Missouri State game. Maiava got the Big Ten offensive player of the week honors while only having half a game’s worth of stats. The Trojans also managed two plays over 70 yards, which tied last season’s total in just one game (and surpassed it after the GA Southern game). Pretty great to see 600 yards of offense, over 70 points, and a 60-point margin of victory.

Then somehow, they managed 755 yards of offense the next game against a better team. Sure, the point total is less, but it’s still pretty difficult to outgain your kickoff yards (649) when you’re kicking off 10 times. Even better that it happened to a Helton coached team. There’s no way Lincoln Riley would’ve survived the long term if he had lost this one.

With all the blowout action, backup true freshman QB, Husan Longstreet, got to get some development as well. He seems to be the opposite kind of passer from Maiava. He holds the ball way too long rather than the other extreme of slinging it up for a pick or a touchdown. If we were somehow able to average the two of them out, we would have the perfect quarterback.

I’d feel bad if I didn’t include a token about of analysis on the defense, especially when I’m about to hit you with some ridiculous math for offense. Some of the cornerbacks rotating in need some work, or they’re going to get picked apart. The front seven also need to do a better job of stopping the run. On the positive side, they are generating more pressure on the quarterback and getting sacks compared to last year. But again…all insights need to be tempered until we see them against better competition.

CommBro Breaker

So the Trojans are currently the #1 scoring offense in the nation. They’re also the leading the nation in total offense. Third down conversions? #5 with 68.75%. They’re leading all sorts of offensive metrics. Where are the negatives though?

Look how weighted things are towards long plays.

National Rank	Play Yardage	# of plays
#1 (tied)	70+	3
#1	60+	6
#1	50+	7
#1 (tied)	40+	8
#2 (tied)	30+	10
#3 (tied)	20+	17
#9 (tied)	10+	42

USC has some of the longest plays in the nation while somehow having run the least number of plays in the nation as well. (They are #114 in offensive plays with 120). Their average yards per play is 11.27, fully 2 yards per play higher than the #2 team at 9.14 yards per play.

The average average yards per play in the nation (if that’s not confusing hahaha) is at 5.97 yards per play with a standard deviation of 1.35. If you’ve ever had the misfortune of slogging through a statistics course, that one standard deviation encompasses 68% of the population, while two is 95%, and three is 99.7%. The worst team in the nation at yards per play (#136), Ball State, sits 2.44 stdevs away and the #2, Georgia Tech, is at 2.35 stdevs. That puts them both at a bit less than one percent: .73% and .94% respectively. USC, at nearly four entire standard deviations away, sits at .0042%, less than one hundredth of a percent. This underscores the absolute statistical anomaly that is happening right now.

Remember Sark’s offenses in 2014 and 2015? They could score 21 points a quarter across multiple quarters and broke the record for most touchdowns thrown in a single game (that still holds)—but anytime they didn’t have an explosive play, their offense sputtered out. We don’t want that. At the end of the day, they have to be able to score on long, sustained drives because better defenses are going to force that. Not saying that they won’t be able to necessarily, but we will have to see.

Anyway, not my best work, but I had to get it in before the gameday started. I feel like a college student bungling my way through a midnight deadline while infected with senioritis.

Stat of the Week: What, diving into standard deviations wasn’t enough for you?