USC had plenty of chances to regain momentum in the second half. But they failed, especially in two critical moments. <\/p>\n
The first was after a downfield pass through the rain from Jayden Maiava<\/strong> to Makai Lemon<\/strong> to set USC up in Notre Dame territory. Lincoln Riley, who is the Trojans\u2019 offensive play-caller, followed that up with… a slow-moving reverse to Lemon where he had the option to pass. While rain was coming down.<\/p>\n Lemon ended up fumbling the ball near the midfield marker, and Notre Dame recovered.<\/p>\n Then, on a do-or-die fourth-and-short attempt near midfield, Riley had Maiava fake a quarterback sneak and roll out to pass \u2014 again, in the pouring rain. Notre Dame was ready for that, too. Maiava\u2019s pass fell incomplete, and that was that.<\/p>\n Riley is one of smartest, most inventive play-callers in college football. But he was too smart for his own good in those two critical moments tonight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"USC had plenty of chances to regain momentum in the second half. But they failed, especially in two…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":315070,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[1318,1317,1315,1316,62,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-315069","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ncaa-football","8":"tag-football","9":"tag-ncaa","10":"tag-ncaa-football","11":"tag-ncaafootball","12":"tag-sports","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115398810294130327","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315069","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=315069"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315069\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/315070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=315069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=315069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=315069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}