Practices at USC are often tougher than actual games

Pete Carroll has a 65-12 record with USC, including a BCS title in 2004 AP

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The three air-horn blasts signaling the end of practice at Howard Jones Field came about a half-hour earlier than usual on Tuesday.

Make that "Competition Tuesday," as it's known at USC -- a reminder to starters that they must earn their jobs every day; a goad to backups to push the guys in front of them.

It is this ethos that fuels the extraordinarily high tempo at Trojan practices. These guys aren't kidding when they say that, come Saturday, the game slows down for them.

The downside of coach Pete Carroll's full-go philosophy is that it tends to generate an inordinate number of casualties. That was evident to spectators at practice on August 28th -- the season's first "Competition Tuesday," as it were -- when linebacker Rey Maualuga annihilated wide out Patrick Turner on a look-in route. The monstrous hit electrified the defense, but also knocked Turner out of practice for two weeks with a bum shoulder. And it was evident after last Tuesday's practice: Carroll spent the first five minutes of his informal gaggle with reporters giving an impromptu injury report. Starting cornerback Josh Pinkard was to meet with doctors later that night. (He has a torn ACL, and is out for the season.) Tailback Chauncy Washington (grade 3 shoulder sprain), and Turner "are ready," unlike linebacker Brian Cushing, whose sprained ankle kept him out of practice most of this week. Wide receiver Travon Patterson's dislocated toe is well again (as evidenced by the sight of Patterson splitting the first-team defense for a long touchdown catch late in practice). Freshman tailback Joe McKnight was ready to doff the brace he's worn (and despised) since "stretching a ligament" in his knee in mid-August. Tackle Matt Spanos, who tore a triceps trying to block Trojans nose tackle Sedrick Ellis, is a long-shot for the most intriguing game in college football this week: the USC's journey to Lincoln, Neb., to take on the 14th-ranked Cornhuskers.

It's an even longer shot that the Trojans will consider ratcheting down the intensity of practices to spare the players' connective tissue.

"How do you become great? You practice the way you play," says left guard Jeff Byers, who's been tutoring Spanos's replacement, true freshman Kris O'Dowd. "It's football. You hit people, you bang people every day. Guys are gonna get hurt. What has made this program so successful, I feel, is how we practice. You can't change that just because you get guys banged up."

Byers has had time to reflect on this issue: he's missed most of the last two seasons with injuries.

I watched some of Tuesday's practice with ex-Trojans fullback Brandon Hancock, a former debate team member who's now doing radio and TV, while finishing his MBA in Communication Management. Hancock was an NFL-caliber talent who will never take a snap in the league because his Trojan career was cut short by chronic injuries. His take on Carroll's take-no-prisoners practices: "During the week, you're preparing against a team that's probably better than the one you're going against on Saturday," says Hancock. "The opportunity cost of that, because we go so hard -- I mean, look how Rey almost decapitated Patrick two weeks ago -- a lot of guys go down. The only reason I think we can do that where some other programs can't is because we're so deep."

He recalled the words of ex-USC defensive coordinator Ed Orgeron, now the head man at Ole Miss. "Coach O went back to the Revolutionary War," recalled Hancock, slipping into Orgeron's gumbo-thick accent, "If you're buddy's in the line in front of you and he goes down, you pick that musket off his dead [expletive] body and you keep on marchin'!"

One of the interesting subplots to USC's game at Nebraska on Saturday night will be written by Sam Keller, the Cornhusker quarterback who last faced the Trojans on a broiling afternoon in Tempe, Ariz., on Oct. 1, 2005. Keller was on fire in the first half, completing 11-of-16 throws for 154 yards as the Sun Devils took what seemed like a commanding 21-3 lead into the half. (This first half against 'SC was Keller's high-water mark at ASU. After injuring his thumb and losing the job to Rudy Carpenter, he transferred to Nebraska early the following season.)

But several things happened in the second half to keep 'SC undefeated. Keller began to think of himself, he admitted earlier this week, as "somewhat bulletproof." He was picked off four times in the second half.

Matt Leinart, meanwhile, who'd been knocked woozy by a cheap late-hit early in the game, abandoned the Trojans big-play offense. According to the lore handed down to us, 'SC won that day because Leinart put the game in the hands of Reggie Bush and LenDale White, who combined for 355 rushing yards, most of them coming in the second half.

"They just ran two tailbacks at us," said Dirk Koetter, then the Sun Devils coach. There was a little more to it than that. On a first-down play early in the fourth quarter, with the Trojans still trailing, 21-17, Leinart flipped a short pass to fullback David Kirtman, who'd swung to his left on a little wheel route. The play went for 42 yards.

Kirtman finished with seven catches for 92 yards. His performance that day is a reminder that, once upon a time, the fullback played a huge role in USC's offense -- a role that disappeared last season, when the team's rash of injuries at the position put a serious crimp in the offense. That shortcoming came home to roost in USC's stunning 13-9 loss to UCLA, which knocked the Trojans out of the national title game.

As he watched Tuesday's practice, Hancock explained how the presence of an athletic, pass-catching threat at fullback makes life much harder on an opposing defense. One is reminded, listening to Hancock's vocabulary, that the guy was Phi Beta Kappa: "A lot of the schematics behind utilizing the fullback are based on a combination route where you isolate one player, say the Will (weakside) linebacker, and force him to make a choice. For example, you run the fullback underneath on an arrow route, and the tight end on a stick route behind him. The Will has to commit to one or the other. And when he makes that choice, [the quarterback] can commit to either the tight end or the fullback. If that person is athletic enough to turn upfield and make someone miss [as Hancock was] that's where you get big plays."

When you're down to your fourth-, fifth- and sixth-string fullbacks, as 'SC was for much of last season, you don't only lose that dimension of the offense. As Hancock points out, "It's hard to get the tight end factored in as much, too."

He describes 'SC's starting tight end, Fred Davis, as "a freak of nature." Davis, a senior, is an ex-high school wideout who goes 6-foot-4 and 250 pounds. "He's about as good as it gets at this level," says Hancock. "But last year he was probably a little underproductive. This season with Stanley Havili coming back to reinvigorate the [fullback] position, both of their numbers will skyrocket."

Moments later, as if on cue, the gifted, multi-dimensional Havili burst through the line, high-stepping into the secondary, not a good omen for Nebraska or any of 'SC's opponents this season.

Not long after, Carroll brought practice to a surprisingly early end. He said it was because the Trojans were ahead of schedule. My suspicion is that he wants to make sure he doesn't get anyone else hurt.

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