SC Defense As Viewed By Monte Kiffin

MONDAY
I have taken this excerpt from ESPN LA's SC Practice Report by Pedro Moura:

• For much of the season, Kiffin and his coaching staff have been criticized for not tackling in practice, with the common belief that the tackle-free practices have led to poor tackling in games. The coaches -- and players, for that matter -- have unequivocally denied any connection between the two, but Kiffin seems to have gone back on that a bit in preparation for Oregon. See, the Trojans are tackling again -- not a lot, but some -- and the reason is apparently because they haven't tackled well. "Going back through the bye and looking at how poorly we tackled, it’s been game-changing," Kiffin said Monday. "If we can tackle at all in the secondary, we’re 7-0 right now. It’s something that we decided to do. We didn’t do it all practice, but we did some live tackling drills and it was good to see. We did a little bit of that last Thursday, with the DBs and Michael Morgan, but we incorporated all the linebackers today.”

• Asked about how the tackling actually looked, Kiffin didn't seem overly happy: “It’s rusty," he said. "You don’t all of the sudden tackle well when you haven’t all year, for the most part. It’s something we’ve focused on and instead of just doing drills, we did it live, basically with our second-team offensive guys, and so hopefully it will pay out.”