(James Santelli, Neon Tommy)

USC’s performance in its 21-7 defeat at the hands of Georgia Tech can be described in all sorts of ways – embarrassing, apathetic, infuriating, perhaps even comical.

All of those things, though, are par for the course in its letdown season for the ages. Every one of those descriptors reared their head at one point or another over a campaign that saw the Trojans become the first team to plummet from preseason No. 1 to unranked in nearly 50 years.

This team played down to its competition all season, and the coaching staff mismanaged its play-calling on both sides of ball well before Monday. Turnovers – four of them, with three coming off errant passes from an overmatched Max Wittek – are this team’s calling card; according to the CBS broadcast, USC’s 34 giveaways were the most ever for a team with a winning record. An overmatched offensive line? Everyone’s had their fill there.

Yet, somehow, we are surprised.

The same process unfolded after each defeat, a five-day warping of Groundhog Day that began with rage, detoured into catharsis, and descended into hubris. USC would win the next one, it was surmised, because the Trojans are better than the other team. No, they didn’t actually win the week before. Yes, the on-field product looked worse with each passing game. But the talent was so intoxicating that it became impossible to think that the slide would continue simply because they had more good players than the other guys and the team with the better players is supposed to win.
What bad team do you know – well, aside from the Texas Longhorns – with a stockade of five-star recruits?

Here’s the answer, once and for all:

This one.

USC isn’t a bad team in the vein of Colorado, which gave every Buff fan in America a weekly sense of forboding knowing that what they’d see each Saturday wasn’t anywhere near good enough to win games. Make no mistake, nothing ever changed in regards to USC’s ceiling. If the Trojans played mistake-free football and its coaching staff put its players in position to make plays, USC had the talent to beat most, if not all, teams in the country.
That never changed, and it’s why we talked ourselves back into believing things would – because, at any moment, it was plausible to expect them to unfurl a spool of points and make someone look silly the way they did those Buffaloes back in the halcyon days of October.

So often, though, they made that concept look as difficult in practice as it did simple in theory. Against Arizona, it was penalties; versus Oregon and UCLA, it was the sieve-like defense. Stanford got their indifference, Notre Dame their timidity. Everyone saw its obstinacy to vary its approach. It was always too much of something and never enough of the rest. The Trojans were talented team playing terrible football, and that recipe makes for a bad team.

On Monday, that bad team only squeaked out a touchdown against a defense that conceded 30 points per game; the only school to manage fewer against the Yellow Jackets was FCS school Presbyterian. Wittek, who looked so confident against Notre Dame, was flummoxed all afternoon and ended his day averaging 2.9 yards per pass attempt. The smart play would have been to lift him in the third quarter after USC followed up five consecutive three-and-outs with a turnover on downs. Instead, Lane Kiffin let his other redshirt freshman quarterback, Cody Kessler, languish on the sidelines, another bullheaded move in a year replete with them and one that begs the question of just how open the competition to replace Matt Barkley truly will be.

The defense, sturdy in the early-going, wore down late as the nation’s fourth-ranked rushing offense bruised and battered its way to 294 yards on the ground. That’s nearly 100 more than USC’s total offense; the Trojans’ 205 yards were their fewest since its game against Cal in 2004.

Watching it was, in a word, exhausting.

The natural inclination is to assume next year will be better and, in truth, it’s hard for it not to be. Monte Kiffin is gone, and with him a defensive scheme that was constricting in spite of its obvious ineffectiveness; one would expect some type of uptick on defense, accordingly.

But so too are Barkley – who may regain some of his luster among the team’s more jaded fans after Wittek looked so ordinary – and Khaled Holmes on offense, and both safeties on defense. Robert Woods announced shortly after the game that he too would turn pro and for all of Marqise Lee’s brilliance, Woods was the one who often played the long side of the field to attract the brunt of the double teams in order to give Lee space to work.

In other words, winning next season – just like winning that “next game” this year – may be easier said than done, especially with what should be a media feeding frenzy focusing on how hot Lane Kiffin’s seat will be.

There will be ample time to speculate on all of that in the offseason.

Right now, though, USC will probably settle for closure after a year in which so little went right. The good news is, after a day or two’s postmortem in the media, they’ll probably get it. Newspapers don’t tend to spill much ink on 7-6 teams.

That’s the chief victim of USC’s fall from grace: relevance. With the BCS circuit about to start and a battle of college football blue bloods in its championship game, the Trojans will enter the New Year with no one thinking much about them at all.

That’s a weird thing to write, and probably a weirder one to accept. But after Georgia Tech wrote the punchline to the twisted joke that was USC’s season, the Trojans have gone almost silently into the night.

Surprised?

After the year this team turned in, no one should be.

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