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They say there are no preseason games in college football, but 2023 USC proves otherwise

matt zemek
·4 min read
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There are technically no preseason games in college football. Games being played in Week Zero count in the regular season standings. They aren’t exhibitions. Yet, in a larger and more expansive sense, the 2023 USC Trojans are in a position to treat the first few games of their season as preseason games in a few obvious ways.

Preseason games in the NFL are all about giving many players a chance to play so that the starters and the composition of the roster can be more fully established. The starters don’t need to play a lot; the focus shifts primarily to backups and to position battles for higher spots on the depth chart (and to simply make the 53-man roster).

We can look at USC’s season opener against San Jose State and see that the Trojan coaching staff was treating this game as a preseason game. Plenty of coaches will roll out a starting lineup for the season opener, making occasional substitutions but wanting to establish continuity and a clear rhythm among 11-man units. This was not that. This was something quite different for USC.

The purpose of all these shifting and shuffled lineup combinations was to get more players a chance to play, and to give the coaches more film on more players. The staff will have a lot to evaluate, which can then translate to the practice field. USC wanted to get a lot of evaluations on a lot of players, instead of giving a smaller number of players extra experience and a bigger workload.

Let’s go into the details of how fully USC treated San Jose State as a preseason game:

PLAYERS SHIFTING POSITIONS ALREADY

STUDY HOUR

SWITCHING ROLES CAN CREATE CONFUSION AMONG PLAYERS

MORE VARIETY IN POSITIONING

ROTATIONS

FLIP-FLOP

MALACHI

MILLER

GETTING THEIR FEET WET

MORE RESHUFFLING

MORE NAMES

ZION

WILL DAVIS GET MORE PLAYING TIME?

MOVING PARTS

CONTINUED MOVING

Story originally appeared on Trojans Wire