USC’s Travis Dye warns teammates about complacency
The running back, who learned to win at Oregon, said he didn't see the Trojans adhere to winning habits in practice before Saturday's closer-than-needed win over Arizona State.
LOS ANGELES — When Lincoln Riley added veterans to the USC locker room from winning programs — Caleb Williams from Oklahoma, Shane Lee from Alabama, Travis Dye from Oregon — the goal was to bring in voices that could create a similarly successful culture.
Sometimes it goes beyond learning how to win. Sometimes you have to learn how not to lose.
After a closer-than-necessary, 42-25 win over an Arizona State team in flux, Dye isn’t sure the sixth-ranked Trojans (5-0, 3-0 in Pac-12) have learned that lesson yet.
“Some people don’t know what it’s like to lose on this team. That can be a problem,” Dye said. “But we’re going to get it right, we’re going to get it right. We’re going to make sure our guys know that winning like this is very rare.”
It started in practice last week. Dye noticed that USC wasn’t working with the same energy level, the same focus, as it did in the first few weeks of the season when the Trojans rolled without effort.
That, he felt, carried over into the first half against the Sun Devils on Saturday night at the Coliseum. The Trojans committed six penalties, four by the offensive line. The USC defense struggled to contain Arizona State, allowing 8.1 yards per play.
This letdown was something that Riley felt, as well, even if USC responded with a much more complete second half.
“It just wasn’t quite us, wasn’t quite the edge that we’re used to playing with and we expect to play with,” Riley said. “We’re gonna have to build, gonna have to play a lot better. We got some really good opponents coming up that we’re gonna certainly need to improve.”
Those opponents would be a feisty 4-1 Washington State team this week, and a trip to face No. 11 Utah, the preseason Pac-12 favorite. It’s arguably the toughest two-week stack in USC’s schedule this season.
It’s a stretch where we will likely learn about this USC team, and whether it is capable of lifting some hardware at the end of the season.
Dye’s concern is that USC’s emotional, come-from-behind win over Oregon State two weekends ago lured the Trojans into a false sense of security.
“It’s almost like this feeling like, ‘Ok, we made it over this hump, we made it.’ When that’s just not the case at all,” Dye said. “You can’t have any type of time where you think that you made it. Until the season’s over, you cannot think like that.”
It’s hard to imagine that hubris would so quickly become a concern for a USC team that went 4-8 a season ago. But USC has already surpassed that win total, and the Trojans have to learn new lessons about complacency and consistency.
That’s what Dye and presumably other leaders on the team will preach this week in practice, when they will try to get the Trojans to not overlook any detail.
“We need to put our main focus on the little stuff and just realizing that winning does not come easy. It’s not something that you just get used to,” Dye said. “You have to come in week in, week out with everything you have. Because you’re going to get everybody’s best shot. That’s just how it is. When you go to USC with all this hype around you, you’re going to get everybody’s best shot.”