Lincoln Riley discusses USC's off week practices

This weekend marked an off week for USC football. This coming Saturday, the Trojans will host Michigan in a huge showdown at the Coliseum, but this weekend, they did not have a game to play.

So how did the Trojans spend their week off? In a press conference this past week, head coach Lincoln Riley discussed USC's idle week practice plans.

"We did a lot of fundamental work, block destruction, just making sure that we're closing some of the air in the run game," Riley said. "So we spent a lot of time on that with the guys. With some of the moving pieces in the secondary, we did a lot of different work in terms of communication, making sure coverage adjustments, motion adjustments, were buttoned up.

"It was good. Obviously having a few of these guys starting to get back healthy a little bit was certainly very, very helpful. We spent time with our guys on some of the penalties. The majority of our penalties have come from the defensive side. So we spent some time in terms of going back through those, penalty education, making sure that if we have a penalty it's an aggressive penalty that happens in the flow of play versus some of the intolerables, which we've had too many of. Each position group and each guy had even more specifics on top of that, but from a general perspective, those were the biggest areas that we targeted for the entire group."

Riley and USC are coming off of a loss at Illinois in which they struggled significantly with fundamentals, most notably penalties. The Trojans will need to play much cleaner football this coming week if they want to have a shot at taking down the Wolverines.

This article originally appeared on Trojans Wire: Lincoln Riley, USC football practice fundamentals during off week