Lincoln Riley and the USC Trojans had been flirting with disaster for several weeks, and living on the edge finally caught up to them in South Bend.

Still, after the game, Riley expressed belief the Trojans can fix their issues and stay among the Pac-12’s contenders.

“Sometimes when you haven’t played your best a few weeks in a row, you can get that feeling of, well, you’re a long, long ways away. The reality is we’re not that far away,” the USC head coach said. “But we do have to push it over the top. We’ve got to play cleaner, we’ve got to coach better, we’ve got to play better on all three sides.”

In a 48-20 loss to Notre Dame, things bottomed out. In many ways, USC beat itself.

The Trojans held the Irish almost 2 yards below their season average on a per-play basis. They had more first downs, they were better on third downs, and they were better in the run game if you account for sacks.

But they gave up six sacks. They committed nine penalties to Notre Dame’s five. And they turned the football over five times.

Won’t win anything against anyone on the road when you lose the turnover battle 5-0.

“There’s no magic pill for this,” Riley said. “You go to work. You address the areas that are not showing up on Saturdays. You look at any personnel changes you might make. What are you doing schematically? What are you teaching fundamentally? Because again, these little things, one of them changes, two of them change and all of a sudden the whole thing can flip. The whole thing can flip. It is such a game of momentum.”

Riley said the most important thing for the locker room is to ignore the outside noise going forward. For weeks, that noise was more of a buzz. This week, though, with Utah coming to town on Saturday and Washington on the horizon, the noise will sound much more deafening.

“As a head coach, I’ve been a part of teams — several of them we’ve had a loss throughout the year because it’s pretty damn tough to go undefeated in college football. In case anyone hasn’t noticed, it doesn’t happen very often. But throughout my career as a head coach, we’ve had one time where we took a loss somewhere in the year and didn’t end up in the conference championship game. One time. In that game, we were one play away from being in the conference championship game there, too.

“This group is more than capable. Now we’ve got to go do it. We’ve got to go make the corrections. We’ve got to go fix the things that we’ve got to fix. We’ve got to go coach and play better. But is it in our power? Is it something we’re capable of? I believe it to my core and we’re going to go fight our ass off to get it done.”