UNWAVERING
How USC quarterback Williams is bouncing back: `Lions don't worry about that'
There was one final rush Saturday night that hit Caleb Williams, who was trudging off the field after a flatlining loss in which USC's superman had finally faced his kryptonite.
A bellowing blur of white streaked towards him, a Notre Dame fan clad in a plain tank top with vengeance on his mind, visibly bumping USC's quarterback in a now-viral video.
“Lemme see those nails now, bro!” the fan screamed, security brushing him aside. “Lemme see those nails now, bro! C'mon!”
Williams stared, through helmeted visor, directly at the camera. Kept walking. Kept chin high. Said nothing. There was nothing to say; he'd painted an expletive directed toward Notre Dame on his nails before leading USC to a win over the Fighting Irish last year, and karma had him dead to rights this trip to South Bend. He threw three uncharacteristic and increasingly baffling interceptions in a deflating 48-20 loss.
He stood with arms crossed at postgame podium a few minutes later, pursing his lips around obvious emotions, eyes rimmed with the same hint of red as after USC's first loss of the 2022 season to Utah.
“As the leader of the team, leader of the offense, I didn't do that good tonight, so I'll be better,” Williams finished his remarks then.
Four days later, after practice Wednesday, any hint of emotion was gone. Digested. Funneled, suddenly, into a smirk and razorsharp gaze, into Kobe Bryant quotes about self-doubt. No longer a man keeping a brave face and standing trial, but the judge lording over it.
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“Everybody wants to be in these two, 12-and-a-half shoes right here,” he said, gesturing down momentarily.
To many, that might come off as cocky. Arrogant. But Williams' words Wednesday sounded just like him, said John Marshall, once Williams' go-to-receiver in high school. A quarterback who increasingly has marched to the beat of his own drum. Carrying self-belief while zigzagging around the target on his back, present since his freshman year at Gonzaga College High in Washington, D.C.
And last Saturday, the target finally got hit.
“I bet he comes out firing on full cylinders this week,” Marshall said of Williams, “because that's just his way of competing.”
Before Sam Sweeney switched to receiver at Gonzaga, he was Williams' competition, Sweeney the incumbent at quarterback when Williams was coming out of eighth grade.
So they scrapped. Sometimes, Sweeney remembered, their offensive coordinator would summon both up to a whiteboard, giving them an impromptu head-to-head test: Draw this formation, this passing play, this blocking arrangement.
They'd start racing for who could sketch out the scheme faster, reaching across the others' drawing to erase a stray icon of a receiver. Anything to get an edge.
“He's always been super competitive,” Sweeney said. “You could see it in the way he plays, and the way he carries himself. And that gives him so much confidence.”
Never a hollow confidence, Gonzaga coach Randy Trivers said. Poised, unshaken, in the biggest of moments. Once throwing a 65-yard Hail Mary touchdown bomb as a sophomore in high school, to clinch a now-legendary championship win over DeMatha, with a minor fracture in his foot.
“People, human beings, are afraid to fail a lot of times ... in football, do you really want the ball? Do you really want the ball in your hands in that crucial moment?” Trivers said.
“Caleb, he really wants it, man. Like, you can look in the dude's eyes, and you can see there's nothing else he'd rather do, and no place he'd rather be, than in a pressure situation with the ball in his hands.”
Every minute, every second, that Williams spends on a practice or game field with a ball in his hands, has become a pressure situation. USC is 6-1 now, one loss against a packed schedule away from all but dropping off the face of the College Football Playoff race, facing perhaps unreasonably high expectations from the nation and their own fans to live up to high expectations they set themselves preseason.
And in evaluating Saturday's loss to Notre Dame — when asked Tuesday, for example, about any struggles with receivers separating against defensive backs — Trojans coach Lincoln Riley has frequently pinned blame on the major loss in the turnover battle. And, thus, indirectly, on his quarterback's shoulders.
“The reality is, you go back and look at that tape, and all three of those turnovers for example, there's wide-open people running around,” Riley said Tuesday. “We gotta finish those plays.”
“I know how it gets for everybody, inside and outside of these walls,” Riley said later, continuing a string of inside-versus-outside remarks. “You feel like, `Oh man, we're so far away.' The reality is, no, we're not.”
The unabashed truth, that's been clear through one-and-a-half seasons at USC, is that Williams has generally been spectacular enough to distract from glaring issues across the rest of the roster. It wasn't enough against Notre Dame; Williams looking off with “three dumb picks,” as he put it Wednesday, brought disaster in the midst of a slaughtered offensive line.
He faces, arguably, an even tougher test Saturday against Utah. And the message coming off Notre Dame, a nonchalant Riley said Thursday, is simple: Let Williams be himself.
And there he was Wednesday, as defiantly confident as he'd appeared all season.
“Some opinion of a sheep,” Williams said, speaking about the boisterous Notre Dame fan, “lions don't worry about that.”