The Sports Report: Caleb Williams is figuring out what’s next and what he learned this season

Howdy, I’m your host, Houston Mitchell. Let’s get right to the news.

From Ryan Kartje: It’s been only two days since USC’s disappointing season came to a crushing conclusion against its crosstown rival, but Caleb Williams is already back under the lights. Cameras are rolling. A crowd is chanting his name. Ca-leb! Ca-leb! Ca-leb!

It’s the sort of scene USC’s star quarterback has grown increasingly familiar with through his second — and presumably last — season in L.A. as his exposure and expectations skyrocketed, a potent combination made all the more volatile by the Trojans’ second-half tailspin. Losing five of his last six games only ratcheted up the attention around the quarterback, challenging him in ways he’d never been challenged before.

By the end, as an ovation greeted him in the Coliseum tunnel after the loss to UCLA, Williams looked emotionally spent, worn down by an exhausting level of losing he’d otherwise never experienced.

Williams won’t hide from the fact that this last season was nothing like the one before. The losing hit him especially hard.

“I’m still learning things I need to get better at,” Williams says.

He’ll consider his options over the coming days, weighing pros and cons using the same process he and his father used to determine his transfer to USC, and spending any spare time with his bulldog, Supa, who has often been his best source of emotional support this season.

It’s certainly been an emotionally taxing year for Williams, and that’s before the painful churn of the draft process. But after mulling it over for 48 hours, the quarterback suggested framing his disappointing 2023 campaign in a different way.

“This was one of my most important years of playing football so far,” Williams said.

“I’ve never been in this situation, where I’m 7-5 and there are no playoff hopes at the end of the season. I’m dealing with it emotionally, dealing with it spiritually and physically. It’s been one of the most important years I think I’ve had. It’s tricky. I’ve had to have talks with [USC coach] Lincoln [Riley] — because obviously I haven’t been through it — or with my family members or people like that, just how to deal with this and lead, how to stay the same person I was before the season or after our first loss or second loss. So it was different. It was a learning process.”

Among the lessons Williams has tried to internalize, he says, is how to maintain better control of his emotions. Though, as he explains himself, it seems he’s still torn on what to take from his experience.

“There’s a time and a place for everything,” Williams says. “But I’m far from ashamed about showing my emotion after any of the losses this year. It shows truth. It shows care. All that. I’m getting better at it, showing it in the right place and the right time. But if I won a national championship or a Super Bowl years down the line — if I was winning, nobody would be saying anything.”

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UCLA FOOTBALL POLL

Should UCLA have fired Chip Kelly? Vote here in our poll and let us know.

UCLA BASKETBALL

From Ben Bolch: Big plans remain in the works for UCLA’s two-bigs lineup.

Withering in the face of foul trouble against Gonzaga last week did not change the Bruins’ opinion that going big is the way to go.

“It can be a big weapon for us,” said UCLA assistant coach Darren Savino, who led the team’s practice Tuesday with coach Mick Cronin out sick.

In theory, pairing 7-foot-3 freshman Aday Mara with 6-9 sophomore Adem Bona should lead to plenty of easy baskets around the rim, rebounds and kick-outs for open three-point shots. The early results have fallen short of expectations, though Mara playing only three foul-plagued minutes against the Bulldogs and Bona being limited to 21 were partially responsible.

It’s true that UCLA is outrebounding opponents by an average of 9.5 per game and has accounted for 86.5% of its scoring on two-pointers and free throws as a reflection of an inside-out approach.

Yet Bruins (4-2) have hardly been a dominant offensive rebounding team, snagging just 31.3% of their misses to rank No. 134 in the country going into a game against UC Riverside (3-4) on Thursday night at Pauley Pavilion.

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USC BASKETBALL

JuJu Watkins scored 30 points for her record-setting fourth 30-point game as a freshman and No. 6 USC routed Cal Poly 85-44 on Tuesday night.

Watkins snapped a tie with Trojan greats Lisa Leslie and Paula McGee, who had three 30-point efforts in their freshman years. Watkins was 10 of 19 from the floor and made all seven of her free throw attempts to go with four rebounds, four assists and four turnovers.

Watkins had 32 points in her collegiate debut against Ohio State, then scored 35 against Le Moyne and 31 against Penn State.

It took a collision under the basket with Cal Poly’s Natalia Ackerman to get USC’s star freshman out of the game in the third quarter with the Trojans leading by 26 points.

The Mustangs scored nine points in a row while Watkins was in the locker room getting her right nostril plugged. She returned to the court with 36 seconds left in the third and made a pair of free throws.

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USC box score

CLIPPERS

From Helene Elliott: When the Clippers completed their long-rumored trade for James Harden, coach Tyronn Lue said his team would need 10 games with Harden in their lineup to figure things out. That seemed optimistic, but not impossible.

They were 4-6 in Harden’s break-in period, but had won four of the last five games and were beginning to establish rotations and some semblance of rhythm and confidence. Still, as Lue prepared the Clippers to face the injury-depleted Denver Nuggets on Monday, he knew there would be more turbulence in store as players adjusted to different roles and tried to become a cohesive whole at both ends of the floor. “I’m going to need 82 games,” Lue said.

He wasn’t kidding. And the way the Clippers played in a 113-104 loss to the Nuggets at Crypto.Com Arena suggested a full season won’t be enough for them to sort out how to make the most of a star-studded group that has shown occasional flashes of being a team.

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BASEBALL

From Bill Shaikin: For the past couple of years, as the Oakland Athletics flirted with Las Vegas, the comparison became painfully obvious: On any given night, the major league team in Oakland could be outdrawn by the minor league team in Las Vegas.

For 2024, we present this delicious possibility: On any given night, the major league team in Oakland could be outdrawn by the minor league team in Oakland.

Not even two weeks after Major League Baseball granted the A’s permission to move to Las Vegas, Oakland is doing something about it.

This is not about protesting the inevitable, or about pursuing litigation that would be doomed to fail because of MLB’s antitrust exemption, or about waiting for the expansion team that might never come.

This is about the people of Oakland securing a team to call their own. A minor league team called the Oakland Ballers plans to play ball next year and beyond, cheekily but earnestly pitching that the A’s might leave town but the B’s never will.

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Dodgers got outbid for Ichiro Suzuki in 2000. Will they lose out on Japan’s next star?

SOCCER

From Kevin Baxter: Shannon Pennington has spent more than half her life with the Cal Lutheran women’s soccer team, first as a player, next as a graduate assistant, then for the last quarter-century as an assistant coach. And CLU has accomplished a lot during that time, winning 16 conference championships and making 16 NCAA tournament appearances.

But Thursday, when CLU faces Tufts in the Division III semifinals, will bring a new experience because for all the team’s success the Regals have never made the final four of an NCAA tournament.

“You know, it is still kind of hard to believe,” Pennington said. “Every year you set out to win your league, make it into the NCAA tournament and the further you go, the better. But it was never anything like this.”

It wasn’t a fluke. At 18-1-5, this year’s team is the best in school history. The Regals outscored opponents 43-12 and posted 14 shutouts. The only loss was a 1-0 result against Pomona-Pitzer in the SCIAC tournament final, one they reversed in the second round of the NCAAs before upsetting unbeaten and top-ranked Christopher Newport University on penalty kicks in the quarterfinals.

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DUCKS

Brock Boeser scored twice to help the Vancouver Canucks beat the Ducks 3-1 on Tuesday night.

Elias Pettersson snapped a third-period tie as Vancouver improved to 3-4 in its last seven games. Thatcher Demko stopped 30 shots.

Ryan Strome scored for the Ducks, and John Gibson made 24 saves. The Ducks dropped their seventh straight game.

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Ducks box score

NHL scores

NHL standings

THIS DATE IN SPORTS

1890 — Navy beats Army 24-0 in the first matchup of this historic series.

1934 — The Detroit Lions play their first traditional Thanksgiving Day home game and lose to the Chicago Bears 19-16 in front of 26,000. CBS Radio does the first national broadcast of an NFL game.

1987 — The New Orleans Saints hold off the Pittsburgh Steelers 20-16 to assure themselves of their first winning season in their 20-year history.

1992 — New York Jets defensive end Dennis Byrd is paralyzed in his lower body after colliding with teammate Scott Mersereau and breaking his C-5 vertebra in a 23-7 loss to the Kansas City Chiefs.

1995 — Grant Fuhr becomes the 11th NHL goalie to win 300 games as the St. Louis Blues beat Winnipeg 4-1.

1998 — Miami’s Dan Marino becomes the first player to throw 400 career TD passes, passing for 255 yards and three TDs in the Dolphins’ 30-10 win against New Orleans.

2003 — LeBron James, 18, becomes youngest player in NBA history to score 30 or more points in a game with his 33-point effort in the Cavaliers’ 122-115 double-overtime loss to Memphis. Kobe Bryant was 19 when he reached 30 for the Lakers in 1997.

2008 — Chris Duhon passes out a franchise-record 22 assists in New York’s 138-125 victory over Golden State. Duhon breaks Richie Guerin’s team record of 21 assists set in 1958. New York scores 82 points in the first half to break the record for most first-half points at the present Madison Square Garden, set when Kansas City scored 81 on Dec. 8, 1979.

2009 — The Indianapolis Colts earn their 20th straight regular-season victory with a 35-27 win over Houston. The Colts came back from fourth-quarter deficits in each of their past five games to become the first NFL team to win five in a row when trailing in the fourth quarter of each contest.

2013 — David Fales throws for 543 yards and six touchdowns in an entertaining showdown with Derek Carr and San Jose State ends No. 16 Fresno State’s run toward a possible BCS bowl with a 62-52 victory. Carr passes for 519 yards and six touchdowns.

Compiled by the Associated Press