Postmortem: Matt Barkley vs. the Sophomore Slump

A season in review. Today: Matt Barkley's second season at the helm at USC.

• The Expectation. Barkley had a weird freshman year in 2009: From mega-hyped recruit to surprise starter to toast of the punditocracy after leading USC's offense on the game-winning drive at Ohio State in his second start to absurdly premature Heisman candidate after a 380-yard barrage at Notre Dame – and then back to being just another overwhelmed freshman quarterback as the Trojan offense bit the dust down the stretch, finishing with fewer yards and points per game than any USC offense since Pete Carroll's first season in 2001.

By any prevailing standard outside of the demanding USC hype machine, though, Barkley turned in a solid debut that put him squarely on the track to fulfilling the golden boy projections laid out for him. With Barkley's maturity, a stable of deep threats in senior Robert Johnson and a trio of celebrated newcomers and a new play caller (incoming head coach Lane Kiffin) in place of the unlamented Jeremy Bates, both the offense and Barkley's personal Q rating had plenty of room for some fairly explosive growth.

• The Reality. Again, Barkley came out of the gates firing: Through the first seven games, he'd passed for multiple scores in six of them, with 20 touchdowns to four interceptions overall and seemingly a firm grip on the offense. The Trojans rolled to a 4-0 September, and the put the pedal down in back-to-back, high-scoring losses to Washington and Stanford in early October, despite producing 30 points and nearly 500 yards of total offense in both. Barkley personally went off for 390 yards and three touchdowns with no turnovers in a losing effort against the Cardinal, and bounced back the following week to bury Cal beneath five touchdown passes and a 42-0 halftime deficit en route to a 48-14 rout heading into the Oct. 23 bye week.

At that point, USC was 5-2, averaging 494 yards and 37 points per game (both top-15 numbers nationally) and Barkley was the highest-rated passer in the Pac-10. On the other side of the break, everything hit the fan.

Barkley turned in easily his worst game on the biggest stage on Oct. 30, serving up two interceptions and botching a shotgun snap (with some help from Kiffin) that helped turned the tide in an eventual 53-32 beatdown at the hands of Oregon. It also seemed to turn the tide in Barkley's season: Beginning with the loss to the Ducks, his last five starts included six touchdowns to eight interceptions – twice as many as he threw over the first seven games – and zero 300-yard efforts. From Oct. 2 to Nov. 27, USC dropped five of eight games, with two of the three wins coming by one point (34-33 over Arizona State) and three points (24-21 over Arizona), respectively. Before he was knocked out of the Nov. 20 loss at Oregon State with a bad ankle, Barkley had already thrown a pick-six and was battling through the most nightmarish first half of his career in a humiliating, 36-7 flop in Corvallis. He didn't play at all the following Saturday against Notre Dame, another Trojan loss in a driving rainstorm.

Barkley was back but clearly below 100 percent in last Saturday's 28-14 win over UCLA, throwing two more interceptions in an ugly triumph that left the offense averaging a full 60 yards and six points less per game for the season than it was averaging at the bye week.

• Positive Spin. On paper, the offense significantly improved compared to 2009, and Barkley continued to show flashes of the pocket presence, downfield arm strength and knack for fitting the ball into tight windows that made him such a scout favorite in the first place. He also established a good rapport with true freshman burner Robert Woods, the team's leading receiver, and left no doubt that the offense is built primarily around his right arm.

• Negative Spin. The Favre-like tendency to strong-arm balls into coverage led to another season of double-digit picks, and contributed to another season of diminishing returns down the stretch. The Trojans were just 3-3 in their last six games for the second year in a row – also failing, for the second year in a row, to crack 30 points in any of the last four. Even within the Pac-10, Barkley was squarely in the middle of the pack by every significant measure.

• The Takeaway. There was some progress in the first season under Kiffin's watch, even if it wound up being of the "two steps forward, one step back" variety. But Year Three is where the rubber meets the road: For other recently hyped pocket slingers like Jimmy Clausen, Mark Sanchez, Matt Stafford, Matt Ryan and Brady Quinn, their junior year was the year the simmering potential gelled into a big season that propelled them into the first round of the draft.

Barkley was arguably ahead of everyone in that group as a sophomore. We still only got glimpses this year (see the brilliant efforts against Stanford and Cal), but if USC is going keep its head above water throughout the depths of the sanctions era, it will have to be by Barkley continuing to shed the "potential" label and becoming the best player on the field. He's still on schedule.

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Previous 2010 Postmortems: Texas' offense. … Georgia's defense. … The demise of Randy Shannon.
Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.

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