Palmer Keeps Critics Guessing

Carson Palmer emerges from the trainer’s room on a Tuesday afternoon hobbled by a deep thigh bruise. He appears almost as pained having to sit down with a group of reporters.

The USC quarterback says he makes a habit of staying away from newspapers during the season. He has missed both the praise and the criticism for his performance in a last-second loss to Oregon last weekend.

Praise for throwing touchdown passes of 75 and 93 yards, the longest of his career. Criticism for throwing three interceptions.

Praise for setting a school record with 419 yards in total offense and guiding his team to a fourth-quarter lead. Criticism for a last-minute decision to throw the ball away rather than take a knee and force Oregon to use its last timeout. The Ducks then drove for a game-winning field goal.

“I can’t let it affect me,” he says of the second-guessing. “I can’t read into it too much.”

No one has ever questioned his arm strength or ability to move around the pocket. But the redshirt junior knows that the Oregon game raised a familiar concern.

“Decision-making,” he says.

It’s an issue that gets raised with a guy who has looked spectacular throwing for 28 touchdowns, but has 31 interceptions. A guy who has scrambled for crucial first downs but, in separate instances, has broken a collarbone and lost a critical fumble by taking on defenders when he might have slid safely to the ground. Even his current injury might have been avoided, he concedes, if he had run out of bounds a half-yard earlier.

Coach Pete Carroll has been emphatic in his support of Palmer. After the Oregon game, he said he has never doubted his quarterback for a moment.

On Tuesday, he argued that the position requires patience, a learning curve that can stretch across five or six years.

“He’s a guy who is still growing and developing,” Carroll said. “We’re in that process.”

In many ways, the Oregon game represented a breakthrough for a USC team still learning the spread attack that offensive coordinator Norm Chow instituted last spring. Palmer had gone 21/2 games without a touchdown when, in the third quarter, he flipped a short pass to Sultan McCullough and the tailback ran 75 yards for a score.

“Unbelievable call by coach Chow,” he says. “He knew they were blitzing. He could sense it.”

While Palmer was reluctant to take credit for that touchdown, he began the fourth quarter with the 93-yarder to a wide open Kareem Kelly.

A nicely thrown 45-yard pass to Kelly set up the go-ahead field goal a few minutes later. Palmer believes they were only a taste of things to come.

“We can get so much better,” he says. “We put in new things every week and there are going to be other wrinkles. It’s a matter of time.”

As for the interceptions, he called them dumb decisions. And the late incompletion enabling Oregon to save a timeout, has he given as much thought to that play as have the media?

“Definitely not,” he says

Better to assess mistakes, learn from them and move on, he believes. Palmer prefers to view these things over the long run, looking forward to a time when he believes his football knowledge and, yes, decision-making will match his considerable skills. His coaches concur.

“We just keep working at it,” Chow said. “It has been an issue. A lot of people have talked about it ... [but] he’s a young man who deserves a little more credit than he’s getting.”

Palmer was reminded of the improvement that former UCLA quarterback Cade McNown showed midway through his college career, a change so sudden and distinct it was compared to flicking on a light bulb. Does Palmer feel such a moment coming?

“I hope,” he says. “I hope the light bulb is about to go on.”