Straight Shooter : USC’s Johnson on Pace to Challenge Pac-10 Record for Completion Percentage

Against Oregon State last Saturday at the Coliseum, USC quarterback Rob Johnson took a snap and dropped back five steps, looking for an open receiver.

He usually is pretty good at this, having found open receivers on roughly 70% of his passes this season.

But on this occasion, no one was open. Johnson, rather than take a sack or force a throw, threw the ball in the general vicinity of Coach John Robinson.

Robinson looked at Johnson and formed a circle with his thumb and index finger.

And after the series, when Johnson came off the field, Robinson said to him: “OK, what was the best play on that series?”

Johnson, according to Robinson, grumbled a bit, then grudgingly admitted it was the throw-away.

It has been Robinson’s only knock this season on his quarterback, in a season when the junior from El Toro is putting up impressive numbers.

“We’ve been trying to get Rob into the habit of throwing it away when there’s no one open,” Robinson said. “That way, you don’t risk an interception or a sack.”

But of course, USC receivers have mostly been open this season.

Thanks to Robinson’s short-pass, high-percentage passing offense, Johnson is on track to set a Pacific 10 Conference single-season record for completion percentage. The record, 70.7%, was set by Rich Campbell of California in 1980. Going into Saturday’s game against Notre Dame at South Bend, Ind., Johnson is at 69.8%.

USC’s hopes for an upset over unbeaten and second-ranked Notre Dame, however, will ride not only on the 6-foot-4, 220-pound Johnson’s right arm, but on how well his offensive linemen protect him against what USC coaches say is the best defensive line they will play against this season.

Johnson says he had his best 1992 game against the Irish, in a 31-23 defeat at the Coliseum. He completed 27 of 41 passes against Notre Dame for 302 yards, a career high at the time.

“We had a chance to tie at the end, but I tried to force one into the end zone and they intercepted it,” Johnson said Tuesday.

To Johnson, nothing surpasses the USC-Notre Dame rivalry.

“It’s the game for us,” he said. “It’s a nonconference game, has nothing to do with the Rose Bowl race . . . but it has everything to do with pride and tradition.

“(Notre Dame) recruited me when I was in high school (at El Toro High, where his father, Bob, was his coach), and I really enjoyed my trip back there. I loved all that tradition--but USC has a lot of tradition, too.”

Johnson is looking for a conservative, tightly played game Saturday.

“It’ll come down to who makes the key third-down plays, or a turnover,” he said. “We’ll probably both be playing very patiently. I expect they’ll show us the same pass defense they gave us last year. And I don’t think they’d change their defensive scheme just because of Johnnie.”

That’s wide receiver Johnnie Morton, who, like Johnson, is putting up All-American numbers.

In three of USC’s seven games, Morton has caught two or more touchdown passes from Johnson. And in USC’s 34-9 victory over Oregon State last week, Morton became both USC’s all-time reception leader with 167 catches, and the Pac-10 leader in reception yardage with 2,560 yards.

But also against Oregon State, Johnson completed passes to 10 USC receivers, another hallmark of Robinson’s short-pass, multi-participant pass offense. Five of the receivers were fullbacks or tight ends.

Robinson has said more than once this season that he had to use a sales pitch on Johnson last spring and summer, implying that Johnson at first balked at the new pass offense.

“That’s not true,” Johnson said. “I was all for it from the start.”

“I was kind of startled by it, when he explained it to me, but that’s because it was 180 degrees different from what we did last year. Maybe he felt that way because of how I reacted to something new and different.”

Johnson also said USC’s passing game has at least one similarity to the El Toro High offense his father coached.

“We tried to flood a triangle with three receivers then, and we pretty much do a lot of that now,” he said.

Johnson was a wide receiver as a high school junior because the senior starting quarterback was Steve Stenstrom, now Stanford’s starter.

Of his being coaxed to throw the ball away on some passing downs, he admits to a fear of turnovers.

“What I worry about is getting hit when I throw, then winding up with a ball that just sails up in the air and you get a pick (interception),” he said.

“Watch games on TV any weekend, and you’ll see four or five picks, where quarterbacks throw a bad ball because they’re pressured.”

He’s unfazed, he says, by Notre Dame’s 10-game winning streak in the series.

“That has nothing to do with us,” he said. “We weren’t here for most of those games. This is still the best rivalry in college football. But I know this game is huge for our seniors, because they’ve never beaten Notre Dame.”