A Ute Hostile for Trojans

The security guard looked at the Utah Utes jumping up and down on the field after their Las Vegas Bowl victory over USC and he walked away, shaking his head.

“A bowl game is a bowl game, I guess,” he said.

No matter that it doesn’t factor into the national scene. It’s still enough to make USC envious.

“I’m real disappointed that we couldn’t have the fun that they’re having right now in that locker room,” USC Coach Pete Carroll said.

We do know this: A pounding is a pounding. Forget the 10-6 score. Utah was the superior team Tuesday. The Utes established their game plan and the Trojans didn’t. They made the plays they had to make and the Trojans didn’t. They rushed for 222 yards and the Trojans netted a grand total of one. Solamente uno.

At least it’s a step in the right direction after the numbers from their last bowl game: minus-23 yards rushing in a loss to Texas Christian in the 1998 Sun Bowl.

USC football: Back to positive yardage.

It’s not the type of stuff you print on T-shirts. This team needed something slogan-worthy, a nice way to cap what had turned into a nice season.

What about going the Prince route and just adopting a symbol: ? Because we’re not entirely sure what to make of this team. It finished 6-6. For the most part, the Trojans beat teams they should beat and lost to teams they weren’t expected to beat. They crushed a demoralized UCLA squad, but the Bruins looked like they didn’t even want to be there that day.

Nothing the Trojans did at the Las Vegas Bowl gave you the sense they were going to take control of the game. And nothing screamed “Watch out next year, here comes USC!”

The only area of the team that consistently met every demand placed on it Tuesday was the punt-coverage unit. On Mike MacGillivray’s eight kicks (a couple of which were clunkers) the Trojans gave up a total of only eight return yards. That’s getting it done. And now the accolades are done.

The offensive line didn’t give quarterback Carson Palmer enough time to look downfield (he took 51 yards in losses to wipe out what modest gains the Trojans had). They didn’t create holes for the running backs.

The offense sold out the defense with too many three-and-outs, leaving the D on the field for 38 minutes.

It doesn’t get much uglier than USC’s first quarter. Minus-30 yards in offense. Here were the distances USC faced on its first four third downs: five, 19, 14 and 11.

Even though Utah had advantageous field position most of the game, the defense hung pretty tough--but still gave up a few too many critical third-down conversions.

David Davis missed an extra point and a 47-yard field-goal attempt, denying USC points it needed to tie. But really, if your offense can’t put the ball in the end zone more than once, it doesn’t deserve to win a bowl game.

This really didn’t come down to a couple of kicks. It came down to USC’s offensive stagnation vs. Utah’s ability to move the ball thanks to running backs Adam Tate and Dameon Hunter, with quarterback Lance Rice hitting a few timely passes that made you think “Why can’t USC do that?”

The Utes ran 75 offensive plays and racked up 358 yards.

“Once we get moving and warmed up, there’s pretty much nothing you can do,” Hunter said.

The Trojans had only one quality possession: their 80-yard touchdown drive to start the third quarter.

“We got outplayed,” USC Coach Pete Carroll said, and his players said pretty much the same thing.

I like that they didn’t make excuses. I like the way Carroll stayed upbeat in the postgame news conference and was classy even in the way he thanked the bowl hosts and sponsors. The defense didn’t snipe about the offense.

There are good qualities about this team, most notably the resilience it showed in winning its last four games of the regular season after it was written off.

You have to like the hunger evident when junior safety Troy Polamalu says: “I just wasn’t aggressive enough. I have so many things to work on,” on a day when he made 20 tackles, including three for losses.

What are we to make of this team?

“I think we made a great deal of progress,” Carroll said. “There’s no question. There’s a good lesson in this: What you did yesterday doesn’t really matter on game day. You’ve got to go out and do it again. We played real hard, we were hustling around and making plays, but we didn’t execute as well as we needed to to get it done.

“That doesn’t take anything away from what we did this year. I would have liked to have had this win just to jump us into the off-season ... but we didn’t play well enough to have that and so we’re not going to get that feeling. We had a great run at the end of our season. I think we found ourselves as a club. We know what we can do. Unfortunately we couldn’t come out here and score enough points in this game to top it off.

“I told these guys, we need to keep building. We had a chance to jump ahead and we didn’t.”

On Christmas Day we saw what USC is right now: a team that plays bowl games in December in front of 20,000 people.

The Trojans can be proud of what they did to get here, but by no means satisfied with where they are.

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J.A. Adande can be reached at: j.a.adande@latimes.com.