For the rest of the year, the season opener against Texas A&M will haunt the ASU offensive line and the team's fans.
Against the freakish athletes of the Aggie defensive line, the pass protection for redshirt senior quarterback Mike Bercovici completely fell apart and the offensive line surrendered nine sacks, two more than last year's season-high.
The hope was that the two games after the beatdown in Houston would get the offensive line in better sync. After all, Cal Poly and New Mexico didn't figure to be big tests for the line.
And yet, at home against those two inferior teams, the offensive line was still unimpressive, especially against New Mexico. Bercovici was sacked once and the protection scheme had to change up in the second half, forcing him to move and roll out on longer-developing routes.
Now a fallen USC team rolls into town and the offensive line still has a lot of fine tuning to do before the Pac-12 opener.
Offensive line coach Chris Thomsen held the entire line a couple minutes after practice to work on the footwork the unit vitally needs to improve before facing the large defensive line of USC.
Thomsen focused this extra couple of minutes on each lineman working on their kick-step, which is used to prevent the edge rush from wrapping around and engulfing the quarterback at the end of the drop back.
USC uses a base 3-4 defense always adding in one extra rusher on passing downs. This extra rusher is almost always from the outside linebacker position, which brings a much quicker pass rusher than a down lineman.
The extra rush from USC is pretty predictable from a X's and O's point of view.
USC's Su'a Cravens is the yin to Scott Felix's yang. When ever one rushes (most likely Felix) the other is covering the slot (most likely Cravens).
Against Stanford last weekend, the Trojans would counter the Cardinal's spread offense by sending a fourth rusher.
When Stanford fielded a trips package (meaning three wide receivers lined up bunched tightly on one side of the field), the linebacker covering that side would play close to the line then blitz from that position while the linebacker opposite him would drop back into pass coverage.
When the offense lined up with a slot receiver and a tight end, the outside linebacker on the strong side (whichever side the tight end was on), would rush and the other outside linebacker would play coverage.
This speedy pass rush coming off the edge necessitates the extra minutes of kick-stepping practice for ASU's offensive lineman.
USC may not have shown their pass rush skill against Stanford, but Thomsen has been wary of the Trojans.
"USC has three down linemen and they are two deep at that position," he said.
ASU will look to take advantage of the 3-4 predicated on bringing pressure from all angles by using slide protection to help against the three bigger linemen.
"At the end of the day you need to one-on-one protect," said Thomsen.
For a unit that has under performed, there has not been much time to right the ship for the offensive line of ASU.
Related Links:
ASU football getting healthy before conference play
ASU football's Graham: Running back Kalen Ballage could return vs. USC
Reach the reporter at brian.w.carroll@asu.edu or follow @biggs_carroll on Twitter.
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