Alexander: USC might have finally figured it out in latest win against rival UCLA

PASADENA — Maybe USC’s football Trojans have finally figured it out.

Maybe it took all of those blown leads, and excruciating losses, to unlock the code that leads to victory in close games.

Saturday night they made it excruciating for their crosstown rivals. UCLA had a 13-9 lead going into the fourth quarter at the Rose Bowl – and for fans of both schools, that combination of numbers has a history, as we’ll explain – and then, in the time it took the Trojans to run a successful gadget play and then complete a pass in the end zone for the first time all night, it was gone.

Jayden Maiava had all kinds of difficulty connecting with his receivers for a good part of the evening. The Trojans got inside the 10 in three of their four offensive series in the first half. In those, Maiava had six shots at the end zone, but five were out of his receivers’ reach and the other was batted away. They came away with field goals instead of touchdowns each time, and the question was how badly those misses would haunt them.

The answer? Not much.

The one that counted, the one that assured that there would be a happy bus ride back to the USC campus, came midway through the fourth quarter. One play after receiver Makai Lemon took a lateral from Maiava and fired a 39-yard strike to Kyron Hudson to get the ball to the Bruins’ 4, Maiava scrambled, evaded UCLA’s Jalen Woods – who missed him twice – and put the ball within reach of Ja’Kobi Lane, who juggled but hung on and got one foot in bounds.

“Ja’Kobi, he’s a great player, a great athlete,” Maiava said. “He came down with an unbelievable catch.”

That was enough. That was plenty. And, given that this was the game that assured USC of bowl eligibility, it wiped away some of the stigma of all of those near misses – losses of three points at Michigan, a touchdown at Minnesota, a field goal in overtime against Penn State at home, a one-point loss at Maryland and a five-point loss at Washington.

And yeah, the Trojans won this one on the road, if you insist. The crowd of 59,473, which filled most of the seats not covered by those huge tarps at both ends, seemed mostly clad in blue, but it turned out the folks in cardinal were making much of the noise.

Oh, and as for the history of 13-9? That was the 2006 score, when Karl Dorrell’s 6-5 Bruins beat a Pete Carroll Trojans team that was 10-1 and ranked second, knocking them out of the national championship game. That winter, as the lore goes, UCLA fans sent out Christmas cards that said: “What time is it? 8:47.” In other words, 13-9. Get it?

There will be no celebratory Christmas cards from Bruins fans this year. It could have been easier for the Trojans, but that’s part of the process.

“I would have liked to have scored a few more times in the red zone,” coach Lincoln Riley said.

“But we’re battle-tested. You know, we’ve been through a lot of them. I (said) when we lost a few of these, at some point this is going to be our advantage because we’ve been in so many. We really don’t know anything else, honestly.”

There were, as you might have gathered, enough flaws in those missed opportunities to fill a film session. And before you, second-guessing Trojan fan, grumble that they should have run the ball more often in goal-to-go territory, here’s Riley’s answer to that.

“We didn’t run the ball well down there,” he said. “We had a number of busted assignments, which is kind of strange because we really were running the ball in the open field pretty well and just pretty generic things for us that we did not do well. And then in the throw game we had an opportunity to make a lot of one-on-one plays. We didn’t make enough of them.”

For the record, USC finished with 86 rushing yards (compared to UCLA’s 111), and Woody Marks had 76 of those on 18 attempts. But in those three red zone forays in the first half, USC had three running plays for minus-3 yards.

Perhaps the Trojans were battle-tested in multiple ways. Last week’s preparation was hindered by a flu bug – Riley said he was hesitant to call it an outbreak – that hit the team before the Nebraska game and hit it harder during UCLA week. (And no, we won’t call it the blue flu.)

“We practiced Tuesday with I think 27 players out, and it ran through over half the staff,” he said. “And guys battled. A lot of guys didn’t feel very good. Even here at the end of the week, the preparation was a little disjointed because of that. But we just said from the very beginning, we’re going to get through this deal here at the beginning of the week, and then there are no more excuses. We said last night at the team meeting, ‘We wake up in the morning, nobody’s sick, period.’ “

Did it even affect the head coach? Riley wouldn’t acknowledge it, but said, “I was able to push the button tonight, so I found a way.”

But it all goes back to the idea of facing down tough times and figuring out how to get past them. And at this point, the Trojans may indeed have learned a lot in what has been a trying season, and getting two more chances to demonstrate what they’ve learned is quite the bonus.

“Sometimes you get so wrapped up in all the outside and you miss the opportunities that are right in front of your face,” Riley said. “Like, these are unbelievable opportunities. These are lifelong memories. It was important for this team here at the end, certainly, to go get a chance to play another game after next week just because honestly, it’s been a really fun team to coach. There’s a great vibe in that locker room, and I think anybody that’s watched us play, you see this team lays it out there every single time.

“We’ve got a little good little streak going right now, and we intend on keeping it going.”

jalexander@scng.com