Went to the USC/Stanford game today. One of the most epic choke jobs I've ever witnessed.
Two things stood out to me:
1. Ty Montgomery is a beast. Easily the best skill prospect on either team.
2. This is the least talented USC offense I can remember. Agholor and Allen are merely okay. The rest are zeroes. The cupboard is bare.
		
		
	 
Agholor and Allen aren't the best talents at their positions on the team. The young guys need to be unleashed like last week.
		
 
		
	 
 That's what you said about Barry Sanders too. You are always hyping deep cuts, but teams usually don't hide their best talents on the pine.
If USC has better players, I didn't see them today. Justin Davis is not better than Allen, if that's what you're implying.
There is typically no better way to evaluate players than to see them up close with your own eyeballs. I was shocked by the pedestrian quality of USC's RB and WR groups. I went into the game intrigued by JuJu Smith, but he did not stand out at all. Average height. Average explosion. Nothing special.
The only guy on the field who screamed "NFL" was Montgomery. I could see Allen getting looks as backup. He was quietly effective. Not in a "wow" sort of way though.
		
 
		
	 
LOL. And Ben Koyack is better than Maxx Williams.
		
 
		
	 
 Funny you should mention Koyack. I also DVR'd the Notre Dame game to watch him, Funchess, Bryant, and Green. At one point Mayock mentioned that the coaches are high on Koyack and believe he could be the next notable name in their TE tradition. I thought he had an underwhelming game, but he spends a lot of his time blocking and seems relatively proficient there. I would still guess that he'll be drafted. He's no Eifert though and I never said he was.
That aside, I mentioned Sanders as an example where many of the Internet "experts" ignored all the major flashing red lights indicating he wasn't that good because they determined that their evaluations of a few fuzzy highlight reels from his high school days were more accurate than the evaluations made by the coaches who see him up close in practice every day and whose livelihood depends on playing the best players available.
There are definitely late bloomers in college and every now and then a team gets such a crowded depth chart at a certain position that even a strong prospect can't get on the field, but generally speaking NFL players stand out from the pack. There aren't many teams in the country who have the depth to keep that kind of talent off the field indefinitely, so it stands to reason that if a player can't get on the field then he's probably not an NFL talent.
I don't see why USC would be playing Agholor or Allen if they have better players on their roster. Maybe they have some freshman who could potentially develop into that caliber of player down the road, but even then you often see flashes of that pretty early. Ty Montgomery is a good example. It took him a few years to really click, but you could see the talent much earlier than that. The guys USC rolled out there today did not flash in that way. It was the least impressive bunch of USC skill players I can remember. Or at least as bad as the drought when guys like Joe McKnight and Damian Williams were their "stars."
There is no Lee on this USC team, much less a Reggie Bush. They've hit a point like Miami where they're just surprisingly mediocre everywhere.