Half-Bad Not Good Enough for USC

USC’s football season plummeted Saturday, skipping past the normal progression from Bad to Worse and plunging directly to Oh God This Can’t Be Happening.

There can’t be many feelings for a Trojan that are more painful than blowing a 21-point lead to Notre Dame, but if any of them care to find out they should try losing a ninth consecutive game to UCLA.

Beating Notre Dame was the sole bright spot in otherwise disappointing seasons the last three years. Now even that candle has been snuffed out.

How could an afternoon in which everything was going so right turn into a 25-24 loss and an example of everything that’s wrong?

What happened was yet another result of the Trojans’ inability to correct a problem that has plagued them ever since they returned to the mainland after their season-opening luau in Hawaii.

“We’re just a first-half team,” linebacker Markus Steele said bluntly, succinctly and accurately. It’s a problem apparent in the cold numbers: USC has outscored opponents 122-37 in the first half and has been outscored 109-79 in the second half (including overtime).

It’s a problem that points to character issues in the players (a lack of confidence is the culprit Steele cites) and an inability to make in-game adjustments by the coaching staff.

It’s a problem that has persisted in the last five games--even the victories in which the Trojans have nearly let big leads escape. USC, which fell to .500, has held second-half leads in each of its three defeats.

“To have the three losses we’ve had this year, it’s just criminal,” USC Coach Paul Hackett said.

Surely Trojan followers have already formed a tribunal.

Hackett knows the savviest thing to do in the court of public perception is to go ahead and plead guilty, take the blame before the enemy can assess it. Sometimes that silences the mob.

He did it again Saturday, taking the initiative in pointing out USC’s shortcomings and calling the second half “a self-destruction derby.”

Hackett has recognized the problem, he just hasn’t solved it.

The Trojans seemed to have everything in order as they rolled to a 21-0 lead Saturday.

They were running the ball well, rebounding from that minus-20-yard debacle in Arizona the week before to gain 92 yards in the first half alone. Quarterback Mike Van Raaphorst made accurate passes. The defense shut down Notre Dame’s option attack. It didn’t commit a penalty.

Perhaps the 21-point lead was a little deceptive. USC did not dominate and the Irish misfired with a blocked field goal and a fumble on their first two trips inside the Trojan 20-yard line. But the Trojans still did more things right than the Irish, and deserved to have the halftime lead.

Because they reverted to the same old bad habits in the second half--costly penalties, unimaginative play-calling--they deserved to lose.

Some might say mysterious forces were at work. Both sides noted how the wind miraculously shifted directions to favor Notre Dame at the start of the fourth quarter.

But unless the wind blew away the USC playbook, it shouldn’t have had that big an impact on the game. After play selection that was 21-18 in favor of the run in the first half, it was 23-11 in favor of the pass in the second half.

“We kind of went away from the running game a little bit,” said Chad Morton, who rushed for 58 of his 85 yards in the first half. “We tried to pass a little bit more and we came up short.”

Meanwhile, Notre Dame concentrated on mixing man and zone coverages in the second half and successfully curtailed USC’s short passing game.

USC coughed up a 24-3 lead in the final 22 1/2 minutes. It was the largest deficit overcome in a Notre Dame victory since Joe Montana led the Irish back from 22 points down against Houston in the 1979 Cotton Bowl.

How fitting. It always comes back to Montana when Hackett is in the discussion.

Hackett made his reputation by tutoring Montana as an assistant coach in San Francisco and Kansas City. But it’s obvious Hackett didn’t learn a thing from Montana about keeping cool in the clutch.

Montana was at his best in late-game situations for the two football games that matter the most: the NFC championship and the Super Bowl. The Trojans are the exact opposite, coming unglued when the pressure mounts.

“We need to be relaxed,” Steele said. “We went out there in the second half, tensed up, and it cost us.”

So Hackett will have to ship another case of wine to Montana, the price the loser pays in their annual wager on the USC-Notre Dame game.

Perhaps Saturday’s meeting at Notre Dame Stadium wasn’t as glamorous as showdowns of the past and didn’t provide much incentive for a national audience to tune in. After all, it was only the seventh time neither team was ranked in their 61 head-to-head matchups since the wire services began their polls.

It meant everything to the two teams involved, and for two coaches under scrutiny for not maintaining the high standards set by their predecessors. “We all knew what was riding on this game,” Notre Dame’s Bob Davie said, expressing only a hint of what was at stake for the two major programs.

The Irish (4-3) won’t be making an appearance in a bowl championship series game this season, but they at least appear to be back on course. Actually, they’re only a couple of plays away from being in the hunt for the Sugar Bowl. Poor clock management killed them in early losses to Michigan and Purdue. By the end of this game, the Irish found a solution: Get the lead and then kneel to run off the final seconds.

Not the most creative problem-solving, perhaps, but effective.

What are the Trojans going to do to fix their mistake? They passed the halfway point of the season Saturday. For a team whose tendency has been to get worse in the second half, that does not bode well for what lies ahead.

J.A. Adande can be reached at his e-mail address: j.a.adande@latimes.com