USC Game Preview: Hawaii QB Sean Schroeder Gets Ready to Come Home

When Sean Schroeder last stepped on the gridiron for game action, Barack Obama and John McCain were duking it out in their Presidential Campaign, Mark Sanchez was leading USC to 12 wins and a new coach was calling plays for the lefty. Now Dana Hills’ former coach Brent Melbon isn’t Norm Chow, and John McCain and Mitt Romney have their differences but the familiarity to the situations presenting themselves for this Saturdy’s USC-Hawaii game are quite interesting.

The junior quarterback may be a transfer from Duke, but he’s not new to the Trojans. Schroeder grew up in the heart of USC quarterback country, and spent his youth watching Norm Chow coach Carson Palmer and Matt Leinart at USC.

As a senior in 2008, Schroeder was interested in USC along with the rest of the major California schools. But it just wasn’t in the cards to stay home, when you consider that at that time, Matt Barkley was a prize commit for the Trojans, and Andrew Luck was redshirting his freshman season at Stanford, waiting for his chance to blossom under Jim Harbaugh.

So given Schroeder’s academic prowess that included a 3.9 high school GPA, an offer from Duke was too hard to pass up. And right on cue, the lefty took no time to graduate from the highly acclaimed university, in just three and a half years.

Fast forward through three seasons on the bench at Duke, and Schroeder is finally set to have his number called. Sure, he didn’t start at Duke, which is considered to be an inferior program to Hawaii, but it doesn’t mean he doesn’t have the talent. Schroeder was the 29th ranked quarterback in the Class of 2009 according to ESPN, ahead of Norm Chow’s former quarterback at Utah, Jordan Wynn, as well as TCU’s Casey Pachall and former ASU quarterback Brock Osweiler.

He’s a soft throwing lefty much in the style of Matt Leinart, and he could very well be a perfect fit for Norm Chow’s reclamation project, and we’ve seen time and time again what great offensive coaches can do with talented yet wayward quarterbacks before (read: Hawaii’s Colt Brennan and every Texas Tech quarterback under Mike Leach). Granted that Chow’s offense isn’t an attack that breeds a ‘system quarterback’ like the aforementioned, but he’s shown plenty of times in the past how we was able to make obscure quarterbacks become household names, like Steve Sarkisian for example, who was recruited to BYU as a junior college transfer from El Camino College in Torrance.

Schroeder was a dark horse going into fall camp for the Warriors, but his swift rise to the top of the depth chart says a lot about the fire and talent he has within. Hawaii might be 40 point underdogs to the No. 1 ranked team in his first career start, but that kind of stuff didn’t stop Tavita Pritchard from being gritty.