JT Daniels is out for the season. USC’s highly-touted sophomore quarterback reportedly tore his ACL and meniscus during the first half of the Trojans’ Week 1 win over Fresno State. This is a huge blow to USC and to head coach Clay Helton’s hopes of keeping his job.
Here’s the play where he suffered the knee injury:
Before getting injured, Daniels looked good in USC’s newly-installed Air Raid offense. In the first half he completed 25 of 34 passes for 215 yards with a touchdown and an interception. Other than that egregious pick in the red zone, he looked comfortable and steady. It appeared as if the Trojans might have had something cooking with their second-year quarterback.
That doesn’t matter now, as USC will be forced to move on and it appears the Trojans will be doing so with true freshman Kedon Slovis under center. That’s a recipe for disaster for a program that needed a good start to the season. USC faces Stanford next week, then travels to Provo to battle BYU before hosting Utah. So yeah, if Slovis is the starter he’ll be getting thrown to the wolves.
This is a disaster in every sense of the word for Helton. He is sitting on one of the hottest seats in the country and big change he made to save his job was to install the Air Raid with Daniels running it. Whoops.
Here’s hoping Daniels recovers and comes back fully healthy.
