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In the final days of his fourth season at USC, with only pride left to play for and a bitter rival left to beat, Trojans coach Lincoln Riley talked to his team about “paving the road.” One day when USC was on top of the college football world again, Riley assured them they’d look back on this season and understand the part they played.
Where that road leads under Riley, no one is quite sure. Nor can anyone say for certain, after a 9-3 finish, how much closer, if at all, he is to making USC the “mecca” he imagined more than four years ago.
But in a season of ups and downs, USC ended not just on a high note, but an especially fitting one in a 29-10 victory over rival UCLA.
“We’re a better team, a better program now than we were 12 months ago,” Riley declared Saturday. “I think this team, some of the resilience we showed throughout the year … we won tough games. We were able to win games in a lot of different ways. The way we played in the second half, really throughout the entire season, there’s just so, so much to build on.”
For UCLA, this tumultuous season had been more about tearing things down. The Bruins fired coach DeShaun Foster after just three games and may say goodbye to the iconic stadium where they’ve played for half a century.
Behind interim coach Tim Skipper, the Bruins showed some signs of life midseason. They won three games in a row, including a stunning upset of Penn State at the Rose Bowl. But that momentum quickly faded, as UCLA lost five straight to finish the season.
“These guys never quit, never quit,” Skipper said. “ We played the No. 1, No. 2 in the country, we played good teams in this conference, and it didn’t matter. We attacked it and we gave it our all.”
The hope, for UCLA, lies in the future, as a new coach could be hired as soon as this week. But for USC, hope was a little harder to grasp onto as of Saturday night, as other blue bloods considered their College Football Playoff paths.
A win over the Bruins alone certainly wouldn’t ease the disappointment of USC once again falling just short of the College Football Playoff. It would, however, ensure that the Trojans finished undefeated at home this season, which Riley said he considered a huge accomplishment. USC also, oddly, became the first home team to win the crosstown rivalry since 2019.
Of course, earning their badge of resilience this season often first meant tiptoeing along the edge of dangerous territory. And Saturday was no exception to that pattern.
They were trailing the Bruins 10-7 after one half. Both lines were getting blown off the ball. The special teams were struggling, with two missed field-goal attempts. The defense couldn’t get key stops. It was, for a while, a microcosm of what had made USC’s season so flawed and, at times, frustrating.
Then, at the start of the third quarter, USC went three-and-out. Disaster beckoned.
That’s when the resilience Riley preached about reared its head. It arrived just in time, after UCLA had crossed midfield and was marching to take a two-score lead.
On third down, defensive tackle Jide Abasiri burst out of his stance, forcing his way into the gap and eventually breaking free to take down UCLA quarterback Nico Iamaleava. The sack, his first of two in the second half, pushed the Bruins out of field-goal range.
“To get our defense off the field, it was major,” Abasiri said.
For USC, it was the third time in the past four games that the defense allowed three or fewer points in the second half.
The offense did its job the rest of the way. Junior quarterback Jayden Maiava drove USC’s offense into UCLA territory before he let one fly toward the corner of the end zone. He hit wideout Makai Lemon perfectly on his back shoulder for a 32-yard touchdown.
It was Lemon’s only catch of the day, after he and fellow starting receiver Ja’Kobi Lane were both suspended for the first quarter of the game. Riley said after that they were held out for a “team rules violation.”
Maiava, meanwhile, finished with 257 yards and two touchdowns — the other to senior tight end Lake McRee — but none were more perfect than his high-arcing bomb to Lemon.
Iamaleava, who was questionable after suffering neck spasms last week, was equally sharp, completing 27 of 38 for 200 yards and a touchdown. But UCLA’s offense spent most of the game dinking and dunking its way down the field, intent on keeping the ball out of USC’s hands. Bruin backs Jalen Berger and Anthony Woods combined for 17 touches and 112 yards as both were critical in helping move the ball.
USC running back King Miller prove critical to counteracting that approach. The walk-on began the season as an afterthought in the Trojans’ backfield, only for injuries to clear the way for him to take a leading role.
He continued to run with that opportunity against UCLA, racking up 124 yards in 17 carries. The last of those carries would be the final dagger in the Bruins’ season, as Miller burst through a wide open hole and sprinted for a 41-yard touchdown.
By that point, all that was left was to ring the Victory Bell, which remains cardinal red for a second straight season.
“I think this team is going to be better in the future,” USC linebacker Eric Gentry said. “And this is going to pave the way. It’s been a very important year.”
Gentry won’t be here to see that job finished. But as Riley sees it, the final product isn’t so far off.
“Things are good here right now,” Riley said. “We’ll look back when things are really, really, really good here, and this will be one of the ones we point to. I promise that’ll happen.”
