USC Football: Week 7 Trojans Opponent Downplays Their Matchup As A Rivalry

Rivalries can't be one-sided...

Last season only one team was good enough to take down your USC Trojans football program, at least during the regular season. USC did lose in its bowl game, but the Utah Utes took the club down twice a year ago.

It cost them a spot in the College Football Playoff, and entering this season, the Trojans had their game against Utah circled on the calendar. Well, they get their chance for some revenge this weekend, as they welcome Utah into the LA Coliseum. 

However, despite all the hype surrounding the game, Utah head coach Kyle Whittingham doesn't believe that the two teams are rivals. 

“It’s been great. I don’t want to call it a rivalry, because I don’t think that’s the situation, but it’s been a great back-and-forth series. Like you said, implications typically every year. Most every year: conference implications, championship implications. Of course, we played them in the championship game last year. So it’s turned out to be a very competitive and very intense football game, and I’m sure this year will be no different.”

Per Kyle Whittingham via 247sports.com

It also seems that the Utes will be taking the film from the Trojans game last weekend against Notre Dame to try and get an advantage. It was the first time that quarterback Caleb Williams looked human since joining the Trojans, so it makes sense that they would use it.

“We look at everything. We’ll look at — certainly the Notre Dame game is very applicable. We also go back and look at our game, two games last year. We do as much research and homework as you can. There’s a saturation point where you get too much and it starts to dilute things, but yeah, we’ll absolutely look at the Notre Dame game and our two games from last year.”



Per Kyle Whittingham via 247sports.com

If Utah can slow down Williams again, they will likely win the game. The Trojans defense hasn’t shown the ability to take over a game when the offense isn’t playing up to par, so this could be the best course of action for Utah.

The Trojans will need to make sure that they don’t allow this to happen again. Every player has a bad game, but Williams will need to bounce back. If he doesn’t, the Trojans dreams of winning a National Championship this season will cease to exist.

The team can’t afford another slip-up the rest of the way, so they will need to defend home-field this weekend. It should be an excellent game, and we can’t wait to see it all play out.

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