USC Football RB Travis Dye sounds off on issues he sees within Trojans

USC Football RB Travis Dye had an excellent game for the Trojans on Saturday versus Arizona State, but wasn't satisfied. Despite Dye running for 62 yards on 13 carries (with two catches for 11 receiving yards) and scoring two touchdowns, he wasn't afraid to talk about how he really feels about the culture of the team and where he feels like the energy is within this group:

"Some people on this team don't know what it's like to lose...We're going to get it right. We're going to make sure that our guys know that winning like this is very rare. The energy level was not where we need it to be, and that type of energy level will get us beat by better opponents coming up in a couple of weeks. So we've really got to get this straight really fast."

- Travis Dye, USC Football Starting RB

Dye said all of this to Austin Green of USCfootball.com. He opened up even further to him, and told him that he started noticing the culture not being where it needs to be in practice.

"I feel like we're slipping on the little stuff a little bit. We need to put our main focus on the little stuff," said Dye. "That's something that as a leader, I need to take to the team and we need to bring guys with us."

It's exciting to see Travis Dye have plans to lead this USC Football squad to more disciplined play.

Travis Dye has been sensational for USC Football this year. Despite playing in a three-back system, he has 422 rushing yards on a 6.8 yards per carry average. He has 96 receiving yards too, on a 9.6 yards per reception average. Both of those averages are much higher than what they were in his best year at Oregon last year.

He most certainly leads by example with his performance on the field, but wants even more than that. That's going to be valuable for this team to be around, as he's one of the veteran players on the squad, being in his fifth year of college football this season.

He hit on how last week's win against Oregon State should not have meant that the Trojans could take it easy in practice for this week's game that they just played against Arizona State.

"It's almost this feeling like, 'OK, we got over this hump. We made it,' when that's just not the case at all," said Dye. "You can't have any type of time where you think that you've made it until the season's over. You cannot think like that. You've got to keep pushing, keep moving forward."

Dye's exactly right. No win against an unranked opponent should ever be celebrated, and in particular should never be celebrated at USC. Especially when the Beavers haven't had over seven wins since 2012. SC's got a 4-1 Washington State team coming into the Coliseum this Saturday, and also goes to Salt Lake City in the week after to play No. 11 Utah. They can't be satisfied with a win in Corvallis.

"Winning does not come easy...It's not something that you just get used to. You have to come in week in, week out with everything you have, because you're going to get everybody's best shot. That's just how it is. You go to USC with all this hype around you and you're going get everybody's best shot."

- Travis Dye, USC Football Starting RB

There are no lies in this statement. USC will always have a target on its back, due to all the trauma it's given everyone in the Pac throughout college football history. And Dye of course would know about that, as he played for another Pac-12 team in Oregon for the years prior to joining the SC program.

Now with SC going to the Big Ten in two years, other programs are going to have even more motivation to try to upset USC. This will especially be the case when the Trojans go up to Utah and play the Utes, in what will be their last time traveling up to Rice-Eccles Stadium for the last time as a member of the Pac-12.