Wisconsin Stuns No. 16 USC 24-7 as Badgers Hold Trojans to Minus-18 Rushing Yards

Lincoln Riley has coached a lot of football games. He has coached Heisman winners, playoff teams and offenses that treated the scoreboard like a slot machine. Never, in his entire career as a head coach, had one of his teams scored just seven points.

That changed on Saturday night in Madison. Wisconsin smothered No. 16 USC 24-7 under the lights at Camp Randall Stadium, holding a Trojans offense that came in averaging 36.4 points per game to one touchdown and minus-18 rushing yards. Yes, minus. The Badgers improved to 5-2 and 3-1 in the Big Ten. USC fell to 6-2 and 3-2.

It was also a little bit of history. According to Wisconsin's official recap (opens in a new tab), it was the program's first regular-season win over USC ever, and its highest-ranked win since beating No. 15 Nebraska in November 2021.

Two picks before the band warmed up

A week earlier, Wisconsin had gone to the Rose Bowl and lost 17-7 to UCLA in a game where the offense never found a pulse. The defense apparently took that personally.

On USC's second possession, cornerback Javan Robinson got a hand on a Jayden Maiava throw and Bryce West plucked it out of the air, returning it 23 yards to the USC 17. Gavin Lahm's 33-yard field goal made it 3-0 with 7:20 left in the first quarter. A few minutes later, safety Cairo Skanes picked off Maiava again and ran it back 27 yards. Both interceptions were career firsts.

The only problem was that the Wisconsin offense kept handing the gifts back unopened. The second takeaway produced a missed 51-yard field goal, and USC eventually settled in. The Trojans put together a 15-play drive in the second quarter and Maiava found Taniela Tupou from 4 yards out with 9:44 left in the half. That made it 7-3, and for a moment it felt like the same old story: good Wisconsin defense, not enough Wisconsin points.

The revenge tour starts with a 5-yard run

Then came the drive that flipped the night. Wisconsin took over with time running down in the half and went 75 yards in nearly eight minutes, a classic Camp Randall grind. Abu Sama III did the heavy lifting with 46 yards on eight carries on the march. The finisher, fittingly, was Bryan Jackson.

Jackson spent the previous two seasons at USC before transferring to Madison. Against his old team, he plowed in from 5 yards out inside the two-minute warning for his first touchdown as a Badger, and Wisconsin went to the locker room up 10-7. Somebody in the USC film room is going to have a rough Monday.

"He showed us something tonight that we thought maybe he had," Luke Fickell said of Jackson after the game.

The first-half numbers tell you how lopsided the fight in the trenches already was. Sebastian Cheeks and Hammond Russell each had a sack before halftime, and USC went into the break with 2 rushing yards.

The turning point: fourth-and-2

Wisconsin got the ball to start the third quarter and went right back to work. Facing fourth-and-2, the Badgers kept the offense on the field, and Colton Joseph flipped a screen to Chris Brooks Jr., who turned it into a 16-yard touchdown with 9:21 left in the quarter. It was 17-7, and it was Wisconsin's best play-call of the night.

Fickell summed up the approach afterward. "Sometimes you've just got to give guys greater opportunities when the game's on the line," he said.

USC had one real chance to answer and the Wisconsin defense took it away twice on the same drive. Linebacker Mason Posa sacked Maiava on third-and-9 for a 15-yard loss, and when Caden Chittenden lined up for a 44-yard field goal, defensive lineman Junior Poyser blocked it. Chittenden later missed from 58. That was about as close as the Trojans got to the scoreboard the rest of the way.

The Badgers closed it the way Wisconsin teams have closed games for decades. They took the ball in the fourth quarter and went on a 13-play, 8:12 drive that ended with tight end Ryan Schwendeman bulling in from 1 yard out with 5:02 left. It was his first score at Wisconsin, and it pushed the lead to 24-7. Robinson broke up a late USC shot into the end zone just to make sure.

The defense that ate USC's running game

USC came to Madison with the No. 2 offense in the Big Ten, averaging 152.3 rushing yards per game. It left with minus-18. Five sacks of Maiava did plenty of that damage, but the Trojans could not run it on the designed stuff either. Shahn Alston, the leading USC rusher, finished with 28 yards on seven carries.

Cooper Catalano had a game-high 10 tackles. Posa, Cheeks and Russell lived in the backfield. West and Skanes made the two plays that set the tone. Wisconsin finished with two interceptions, five sacks and a blocked field goal, and the seven points were USC's fewest in a game since a 17-3 loss to Stanford in 2018, per Wisconsin.

Maiava threw for more than 250 yards, but the USC passing game never produced the kind of chunk plays that could make Wisconsin pay for crowding the line. He did not dodge it afterward. "Flat out, I just didn't play great," Maiava said. "I got to play better for my teammates."

The numbers that tell the story

Here is the strange part: Wisconsin won this game with 58 passing yards. Joseph was 12-of-14 with a touchdown, which works out to under 5 yards per completion. He added 32 rushing yards, and the Badgers ran 42 times for 142 yards, with Sama leading the way at 71.

USC actually outgained Wisconsin 239-200 and racked up more first downs. It did not matter. The Badgers won the turnover battle 2-0, converted 6 of 12 third downs, and controlled the clock for more than 32 minutes. Every snap is in the official box score (opens in a new tab).

This was not a pretty offense. It was an efficient one, which is a different and more useful thing. Wisconsin did not need Joseph to win the game. It needed him not to lose it, and he did not throw a pick.

What it means

For Wisconsin, this is now two wins over ranked teams in a month, after the 24-20 comeback at then-No. 13 Penn State in September. It was also the Badgers' third straight home win over a ranked opponent. Fickell spent the offseason hearing about his seat temperature. This team has quietly become a problem for anyone who has to visit Madison.

The schedule did not ease up. Next was a Halloween trip to Kinnick Stadium to face Iowa, a matchup built around rushing yards and field position more than anything Joseph does through the air. After that comes a home game against Rutgers on Nov. 7.

For USC, the alarm bells are ringing. A team that started 6-1 now has an offense that could not get out of its own way in Madison, and next on the schedule was a Halloween night home game against No. 3 Ohio State. Riley owned it. "Just flat-out didn't play good enough on any of the three sides of the ball," Riley said. "I take responsibility for it. It's hard to win on the road, and you have to play a lot better than we did tonight."

The last word

Riley also insisted that the season is far from over. "When we're at our best, we can beat anybody," he said.

Maybe. But on Saturday, the best team on the field wore red, ran the ball 42 times, and turned a former Trojan into the guy who flipped the game. Wisconsin did not need fireworks to beat USC. It just needed the Trojans to go backward, and for one night in Madison, they did exactly that.

Sources: Wisconsin Athletics recap and box score, The Associated Press, Field Level Media, SportsGrid, ClutchPoints, Sports Illustrated's Wisconsin site and Saturday Down South. More college football coverage on Undrafted.

Photos: David Stluka/Wisconsin Athletic Communications.