USC rallies past Texas A&M for thrilling Las Vegas Bowl victory

28.12.2024 10:48

DailyNews.com

USC wide receiver Kyle Ford celebrates after catching the game-winning touchdown pass with eight seconds left in their 35-31 victory over Texas A&M in the Las Vegas Bowl on Friday night at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas. (Photo by David Becker/Getty Images)

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LAS VEGAS — The hometown kid only had a few tickets to spare. This wasn’t the Coliseum, after all. But the family, still, made do, dozens upon dozens of uncles and aunts and cousins flooding into the lower basin at Allegiant Stadium, some all the way from the islands of O’ahu.

After the last of the red-and-gold confetti settled on the turf, after all possible sides of Jayden Maiava and all possible sides of his USC team showed themselves in a 35-31 comeback victory over Texas A&M in the Las Vegas Bowl on Friday night, he climbed the ladder to the stands to meet his people. He stopped, briefly, to sign the shirt of a young fan rocking a mullet. He gave his mother a long hug. It was a journey come full circle, from his days playing high school football in Las Vegas to the UNLV campus down the road that he had transferred from, and the soft-spoken Maiava wore a soft-speaking smile.

The quarterback is exceptionally hard on himself, as USC receiver Kyle Ford detailed after the game. There was plenty, on Friday night, to be hard on himself about. Maiava played, at times, some bad football, as USC sunk into a 24-7 crater at one point in the third quarter. He threw three confounding interceptions. After one of them, Ford said, Maiava had come back to the sidelines moping. My bad, guys.

“We’re like, ‘Bro, we don’t care,’” Ford recalled. “‘Like, no one even cares. It’s not a big deal.’”

Alright, cool, let’s roll, Maiava responded.

“And then from then on,” Ford continued reflecting, “he was just the leader that he was.”

In the final 20 minutes of the game, Maiava threw three touchdown passes. One, a 17-yard floater to burgeoning superstar receiver Ja’Kobi Lane. Another, a fourth-quarter go-ahead score to the 6-foot-4 Lane, the game’s Offensive MVP, who stretched every inch of his arms across the plane. And, after the Aggies retaliated to take a three-point lead with 1:49 left, Maiava threw his fourth touchdown pass of the night, a 7-yard, game-winning strike to Ford with eight seconds left.

Ford, the senior who had spent six bumpy years at USC and past USC and back again, dropped to his knees in the end zone in vindication. Maiava simply raised his hands to the heavens, a quarterback who was 6 of 18 at one point finishing the night 22 of 39 for 295 yards, four touchdowns and three interceptions that could have killed his young confidence but never did.

“I think he’s a perfect example of – our team, just not giving up,” linebacker Easton Mascarenas-Arnold said.

And the game, too, was a perfect example of this messy season in which the Trojans finished 7-6 overall (4-5 in the Big Ten). Flawed, inordinately. Doomed, eventually. And yet, fighting to their very last breath each and every week, ending as it had begun with a thrilling win against an SEC program in Las Vegas. First came their season-opening victory on this same field over LSU, when Miller Moss was the sort-of hero, with a short runway of grandeur. Bookended was Friday’s season-ending win against Texas A&M, when Moss’ replacement Maiava was the sort-of hero, with an uncertain runway of grandeur.

By the third quarter, fans had all but written off Maiava as USC’s quarterback of the future, under a bevy of mistakes. Riley, though, expressed the same faith he had through four bumpy weeks as his starter.

“I’m very confident in him, I’m very confident,” Riley said after the game when asked about his confidence in Maiava as the program’s starting quarterback going forward.

“That guy’s so selfless, so about the team,” Riley continued, a couple of sentences later, “that I think he’s just going to continue to get better and better.”

The calamities piled up, well beyond Maiava, for several quarters on Friday. Starting left tackle Elijah Paige went down with an injury. USC’s defense alternated between stretches of dominance and stretches resembling Swiss cheese. And Riley ran into some trouble to end the first half: with a minute left in a 7-7 game and USC driving at the A&M 24-yard-line, the head coach opted for sheer conservationism and simply let the clock wind down to set up a 39-yard field goal attempt for Michael Lantz.

Lantz missed, on a fourth-and-1. Momentum torpedoed, heading into the third quarter, as the Aggies built their third-quarter lead behind two touchdown strikes from quarterback Marcel Reed.

USC’s defense held largely tough from there, though, forcing three straight stops as the offense got humming. Maiava bounced back from a vibe-killing early fourth-quarter interception to find Lane for that go-ahead score. And facing a third-and-13 with just 25 seconds left, down by three, Maiava hit Lane again on 33-yard and 11-yard gains to set up the eventual Ford winner.

It marked a true national coming-out party for Lane, who finished with seven catches, 127 yards and three touchdowns in his second consecutive three-TD game. He was there, at every turn, when Maiava needed him. And they walked away with a stunning win, the kind that could propel their offseason, the kind that could provide a silver lining to a season of frustration.

“You just kind of feel it, within the locker room right now,” Riley said, “like a confidence that they’re going to be in every single fight, and we’re not going to go away, and that we’re just going to keep getting better and better.”

Eventually, after an onslaught of hugs in the stands, Maiava turned to a cardinal-and-gold ladder sitting beside him. A member of USC’s Spirit of Troy student band handed him a silver Trojan sword. The band struck up the familiar notes of “Fight On,” Maiava holding the sword aloft, looking high above the Las Vegas community he grew up in and the USC community he had come to embrace.

And the soft smile became a full-fledged beam, Maiava head-banging in glee, the homecoming becoming a coronation.

USC rallies past Texas A&M for thrilling Las Vegas Bowl victory

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