I'll be honest. I started writing my final thoughts right before overtime. Considering the fact that both teams start on the 10 yard line, and that Carson was running the ball with ease, I expected Matter Dei to lose their first game of the season in overtime.

The picture on the left shows Matt Barkley and Morrell Presley giving each other a friendly pat as they flipped the coin for overtime. Pete Carroll would call this picture a perfect Kodak moment as both stars have verbally committed to become future Trojans. The two did nothing but impress in this evening's game. Yeah, Reggie Bush can return punts, but can he kick the punts himself? It's impressive how versatile Morrell Presley is. He will probably never have to punt the ball in college or in the pros, but the fact that he'll add that to his bag of tricks along with blocking, and embarrassing DBs as a TE and WR just amazes me. This 3.0+ student athlete should have no trouble fitting in with the rest of the Trojans next year.

I'm curious to read what writers will say about Matt Barkley's performance. Six touchdowns in a game is impressive. He would have had 2 more that would probably have changed the course of the game if it weren't for silly penalties on their team. From that perspective, he really played a solid game. I watched the replays several times specially the game winning TD in 3OT. Barkley looked left. He looked right. He motioned left. Then he threw a rocket to the right for his receiver to catch. He threw 4 ints earlier in the game including 1 in 2OT. The fact that he can forget about those and maintain his poise and throw that dart pass 2 defenders to find his man made me forget about his earlier mistakes. To sum it up, in my opinion, I think Matt Barkley is as good as advertised.


Absolute final thought: High school kids can't kick field goals. Which is fine cause neither can most people reading this blog. :)