Coach Carroll broke the silence at the start of this afternoon's team meeting, the first since Saturday's defeat, with a question.
"Are you ready?"
Ready to move on from the 47-20 loss, ready to bounce back, ready to finish this season strong.
"What happens now is what counts," Carroll told his players. "It's what we do with this that matters. There is nothing we can do about what just happened. Some kind of bomb hit the tracks we were running on, we ran across a pothole in the road.
"But we leave that behind us."
So now the emphasis is on taking the next step, and that starts with practice, film sessions, workouts and everything else that goes into making the Trojan football machine hum at unprecedented levels.
But as is the norm on Mondays, part of taking that next step includes capturing the truths from the previous game so they can learn from their past successes and failures and apply them to the future.
"Offensively, we were in character -- Matt [Barkley] was throwing it, Joe [McKnight] was running it and Damian [Williams] was catching it. No turnovers [until the final seconds], no major penalties, things were clicking pretty good," Carroll said. "But on the other side of the ball, we were screwed up. It felt so uncharacteristic of us.
"And it goes right to me. I'm sick for you."
After that snippet of a recap, the loss was in the books. Just a little film-watching this afternoon stood between the Trojans and putting that game to bed. Now the attention turns to, as Carroll says, "getting our football right" through practice and hard work. Then, the true transformation and growth can occur.
"Let nothing stand in the way of who we are and who we are capable of becoming," Carroll said. "I'm calling on you, because we've got to answer the call. What we can control is right in front of us, and that's a powerful thought.
"Are you ready? Because we're going places."
University Southern California Trojans
Wednesday, July 08
Wednesday, July 08
Wednesday, July 08
Monday, July 06
