What concerns USC football about Penn State? Nothing much, for real

This could be labeled the Buyer’s Remorse Bowl.On one sideline will be USC’s Lincoln Riley, still trying in Year 5 to prove he was the right hire to take the Trojans somewhere meaningful.On the other will be Penn State’s Matt Campbell, the recent James Franklin replacement who is already making some fans hanker for Franklin.Hired away from Iowa State late in the coaching carousel, Campbell was initially hailed as having salvaged a chaotic search.Back-to-back losses to open Big Ten play — including a 34-13 drubbing by Northwestern — have considerably lessened the level of enthusiasm.That makes the game between the No.19 Trojans (5-1 overall, 2-1 Big Ten) and Nittany Lions (3-2, 0-2) on Saturday at Beaver Stadium something of a midseason referendum on who might qualify as the bigger disappointment.Here are five things to watch in a game scheduled to kick off at 4:30 p.m.

PT on NBC: Can a team gain momentum from an ugly win? Riley seems to believe so.Needing to score the final 15 points and make a late defensive stop to beat Washington last week may not have impressed many Trojans fans, but it apparently served as a galvanizing moment for their coach.Riley praised his team’s resolve for rallying past the Huskies amid a home crowd that briefly turned on the coach early in the third quarter, chanting “Fire Lincoln!” as USC fell into a 21-10 hole.Those chants were silenced the rest of the way, and Riley said he believed his team may have unlocked something meaningful by the way it pulled together.“It wouldn’t shock me if in six, eight weeks down the road, whatever it is, if we look back on this and see that game is one of the critical points of the season,” Riley said.“I think just the way that it transpired, the way we won the game, winning a game a different way than we’ve won all season, it develops the personality of your team.”The award for the biggest workload this week might have gone to USC’s volume control at its practice facility...