USC may have found a QB, but it still faces major hurdles

Let us begin with the newest, greatest USC quarterback of all time (no overreactions here), an 18-year-old three-star recruit with a name drawn straight from a Thomas Pynchon novel. If you believed all USC needed to rediscover its place in college football’s firmament was to suffer a season-ending injury to its starting quarterback, JT Daniels, then score 35 consecutive points against Stanford behind a backup named Kedon Slovis, and then accept the resignation of its A-list celebrity athletic director a couple of days later ... well, you are clearly an oracle.  

And yet here we are.

Two weeks into a six-game gauntlet that was built to destroy the tattered remains of USC coach Clay Helton’s career, the Trojans are 2-0 and ranked No. 24. Teammates are saying things about Slovis that make him sound like The Chosen One -- ”He’s the guy for sure,” one told the Los Angeles Times’ Bill Plaschke -- and the students’ section at the Los Angeles Coliseum is already chanting his name.

USC has long been a program driven by an aura of celebrity, and after 60 minutes as starter against Stanford, Slovis appears to have that sheen. 

 “Dang,” USC center Brett Neilon said after watching Slovis loft a touchdown pass that sparked the Trojans’ comeback from a 17-3 deficit to a 45-20 win. “This kid is for real.” 

It sounds great for USC, which went 5-7 under Helton last season and is more than a decade removed from Pete Carroll’s last Rose Bowl. It sounds great for the struggling Pac-12, which desperately needs a standard-bearer as it limps toward yet another season without a College Football Playoff contender. 

And it sounds great for college football, which is always better when those late-afternoon games in the brilliant sunshine of Los Angeles actually mean something.

In fact, this past week felt a little bit like the beginning of a purge of the intermittent ugliness of the past decade. The resignation of Swann -- who never seemed particularly interested in his job, or particularly good at it,  given the cloud of the academic scandal that surrounded him -- was a necessary first step toward a more legitimate overarching plan for this program’s future. 

But it's almost certainly not the last step. 

Because as much as we may want to pump life into this team, and into this moment, we’re probably nowhere near the end of the Trojans’ long odyssey back to the sport’s elite. 

In terms of the big picture, it’s still unclear if Helton is the guy -- or if he and offensive coordinator Graham Harrell have the mojo to turn Slovis into the quarterback that he seemingly has the potential to be. And in terms of this very moment, USC still must face the wringer of four straight games against good-to-great teams, beginning with Saturday's against BYU, which upset the hot mess known as the Tennessee Volunteers last weekend.  

Is the kid for real? We’ll know more after Saturday, Slovis’s first high-profile road game. We’ll know more after he gets Utah -- perhaps the Pac-12’s best remaining playoff hope, outside of long-shot USC itself -- the following weekend, and then plays back-to-back road games against Washington and Notre Dame.

And I get that it feels good to imagine what could be -- to think that USC could once again matter in the national picture, to think that the Trojans could once again recapture the Hollywood aura that they’ve had, on and off, since the 1960s. 

But for now, it’s still a pretty thin veneer of hope. Maybe the 18-year-old kid with the Pynchon name really is The Guy. Maybe he saves Helton’s job, and maybe he runs the gauntlet and leads the Trojans back to a major bowl, and maybe the Trojans become a playoff contender heading into next season.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It's a hell of a good trailer, but the movie itself is yet to come.