USC Football: Talk of Title Hopes Are Trojans' New Distraction

Thanks to a marquee road win and a Top 10 AP ranking, USC football is no longer just associated with drama and distractions. Now the Trojans can be called title contenders.

Talk of a College Football Playoff berth has replaced headlines about cornerback Josh Shaw's suspension and former running back Anthony Brown's messy departure at outlets like Yahoo! Sports and USA Today. But now there's a new distraction: expectations.

“I don’t think that exists here,” first-year head coach Steve Sarkisian joked on Tuesday’s Pac-12 coaches teleconference call when asked if he wanted a week free from drama or possible distraction.

Sarkisian may not have anticipated the off-field spotlight would be cast on him before his first game. Championship expectations, on the other hand? Those he was prepared to face.

“My expectations were that I was choosing to take this job at USC because it was one of, if not the best job in America,” he said. “There’s a long line of history and tradition here of winning football championships, accolades, all those sort of things. That’s the expectation level here at USC.

“If you take this and that’s not what you have in mind, this probably isn’t the right job for you,” he added.

As those expectations start to become reality, the Trojans have generated so much outside buzz for so long, the chatter is becoming white noise.

“We’ve learned a lot about our team,” Sarkisian said. “We learned a lot about the maturity and leadership on our team. These are great examples for us that we can hold onto to for the future...regardless of the distractions that are going on outside.”

One of those leaders for USC is defensive lineman Leonard Williams. He made 11 tackles and a sack en route to Pac-12 Defensive Player of the Week recognition—and he did it on an injured ankle.

After practice Wednesday, Williams explained a mindset in the Trojans locker room that remains consistent through both praise and criticism.  

"Coach Sark always tries to tell us to stay out of the hype, whether it's negative hype or positive," he said.

Ezra Shaw/Getty Images

If Williams is a fitting leader in USC’s collective effort to block distractions, it may be because he has experience with it. His play was a constant for USC through a tumultuous 2013 season that included a 3-2 start, the midseason firing of Lane Kiffin and a highly publicized coaching search.

Williams is now the face of the mounting praise coming USC’s way after the win at Stanford. His play through his ankle injury validates NFL draft pundits, like B/R's Matt Miller, who project him to be one of the first selected next May.

But Williams has also seen how fleeting the positive hype can be. He was a Freshman All-American on the 2012 USC team that opened the season atop the AP Poll and finished unranked following a 1-5 finish.

The risk these Trojans run with getting caught up in their own hype is similar to what that team endured: losing its edge. Holdovers like Williams and the new coaching staff are working to ensure that title talk won’t be a distraction.

“In the beginning of the [2014] season, people weren’t really talking that highly of us,” Williams said. “Now that they are, [Sarkisian] wants us to keep ignoring all of that and just keeping like we’ve been working. Keep acting like we’re at the bottom, because that’s what got us here.”

Quotes obtained firsthand unless otherwise cited. Statistics courtesy of CFBstats.com.