USC’s Brade Budde thinks USC needs to find a way to build Matt Barkley’s confidence after a blowout loss to Stanford.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t surprised with last week’s result. When you look at USC recently, we’re struggling with confidence.
Confidence is a byproduct of successful behavior. Here, you have a quarterback who was borne into confidence at the high school level. So of course he’s going to be confident because he’s never experienced on-field adversity. But now he is. Your emotion isn’t going to save you in this instance, especially for Matt Barkley. It’s your problem-solving capabilities.
If you’re asking me what should be the focus, it’s that they need to get this young quarterback to be able to problem solve. Last week, he had three picks and a fumble. When things are difficult and it seems to be getting worse, you have to simplify things and go back to the fundamentals. As he becomes successful, then you can add more to his plate. But this is too much.
They just haven’t established an offensive identity with Barkley at the helm. They don’t seem to be emphasizing the running capabilities of this team, so Barkley is going to be directly tied to the success of this team.
Something is wrong. And something needs to change. But problem solving starts with Barkley and continues throughout this team, and that needs to be changed.
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College Football Hall of Famer and 1979 Lombardi Award winner, Brad Budde is currently a business performance coach for Game Day Communications in Southern California, which he owns and operates.
Got a question or comment? E-mail him here
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