USC at Washington State
USC visits Washington State this week where they’ll be an -8.5 point road favorite over the Cougars. The total on the game is 62 and the game can be seen live on FOX.
Washington State came into this year after only playing 4 games in 2020. Perhaps that lack of playing time combined with the fact that Washington State may not be very good to begin with, is reflected in their results thus far.
The Cougars lost their opener to a Utah State team that was 1-5 last season and blown out in every game they lost by MWC opponents. Last week they beat Portland State 44-24 but they gave up 420 yards of total offense.
Helton Gone
USC looked good at 5-1 last year losing the PAC-12 Title game to Oregon by a TD. But they too stumbled already this season. They beat San Jose State in their first game but were upset by Stanford last week.
USC has dominated this series. Going back to the 1920’s, in 74 games USC stands at 60-10-4. The results over the next 74 games are likely to be similar. USC gets talent. Always will.
For that reason, we were going to suggest that Clay Helton was definitely on the hot seat when we set out to write this game up. Well, we were right. Helton was fired on Monday.
The team is stacked with returning talent. The loss to Stanford shouldn’t have been tolerated, and wasn’t.
Again, the talent is there and always will be. Sub par results can only mean one thing. Poor coaching.
Our model suggests that USC win this one handily. It predicts a USC win by 17 points or more. Look for the talent gap to be evident this week as the Trojans put it all together.
USC -8