Behind The USC Trojan's Scoring Decline - Part I

USC Trojan fans have fretted extensively the past two seasons as the team's offensive production has marginally declined. In hindsight this decline was somewhat inevitable after the 2005 season when the strongest offense in USC history largely departed for the NFL.

Still however the most recent Trojan squads did not match up to the level achieved by the 2002 to 2004 teams fielded by Head Coach Pete Carroll.

Whenever offensive points production falls off the normal fan and media tendency is to put all the blame on either the quarterback and/or the offensive coordinator.  While this is indeed often the case there normally is more to the picture than initially meets the eye.

This article takes a closer look at USC football points production using five different categories across several years. The intent of the article is to analyze the points scored by the Trojans as well to identify the main sources of variation.

I did not fully include 2001 or 2002 in this study since the scoring drive charts were not all posted online by USC's Athletics Department for those games. For the few games I sampled however the same trend that I will explain below held true.

For starters lets review USC's total points production over the past seven years.

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