Right after USC’s Week 1 game ended, after answering a few minutes of questions about what was wrong with USC’s receivers, Deontay Burnett got his hands on the game film and watched.
“It wasn’t that bad,” Burnett said this week.
Burnett, quarterback Sam Darnold and the rest of USC’s offense had made similar claims all preseason. The problem was, they’d never proved it.
Enter this two-play stretch in USC’s 42-24 victory over Stanford on Saturday. Driving at the end of the first half, USC was backed up, facing second and 20. So Darnold lobbed a perfectly placed heave right into the arms of a diving Steven Mitchell Jr.