Matt Barkley to play this weekend!

Matt Barkley

LOS ANGELES — Pete Carroll is hoping the return of perhaps USC’s two most important players will put the 12th-ranked Trojans back on track after last week’s loss at Washington.

Carroll is hopeful quarterback and safety Taylor Mays will be able to play in Saturday night’s home game against woeful Washington State. Barkley is throwing again after missing last week with a bruised shoulder, while Mays is expected to practice Tuesday after sitting out his first college game with a knee injury.

Barkley participated in several parts of Tuesday’s practice, throwing passes for the second straight day after missing last week’s loss with a bruised shoulder. He said he still feels discomfort and needs to regain velocity with his passes.

“I don’t really have any zip on it yet,” Barkley said, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Mays missed his second practice of the week after sitting out his first college game with a right knee injury. Mays was allowed to run straight ahead Tuesday but wasn’t cleared to move laterally on the sprained knee, Carroll said.

“I don’t think that’s a great sign,” the coach told ESPN The Magazine’s Bruce Feldman. “I was hoping he’d be ready. That doesn’t mean he won’t make it [this weekend]. I wished he would be ready to do more than that.”

Carroll said Barkley likely would start if he’s healthy enough to throw effectively, a decision that won’t meet much resistance from Trojans fans after Aaron Corp’s inaccurate performance against the Huskies. Third quarterback Mitch Mustain apparently is still the third choice despite the Arkansas transfer’s experience.

“Coming off that field was not a good feeling — I don’t want that to be my only feeling as a starter,” Corp told the Times. “So I definitely want to get back out there and I definitely want to prove that I’m capable.”

Carroll also is back at work on a familiar task in recent years. He has to restore his talented players’ confidence after another early-season Pac-10 loss — 16-13 to Washington in the final seconds — likely knocked the Trojans (2-1) out of the national title race yet again.

“It is a shock, it is that, but I don’t address it in that way,” Carroll said. “We have a way of communicating, how we deal with the setbacks and how we’re moving forward. I don’t like to be good at it, but I want to be good at it, I guess, because we have to.”

Although Carroll hasn’t figured out how to stop these lapses, he also doesn’t let them linger. USC hasn’t lost back-to-back games since the fourth and fifth games of his first season at the school in 2001. Against Washington State, USC couldn’t have a better opportunity to get back on track — even if it might already be too late to save the Trojans’ national title hopes.

“It’s not small for us,” USC linebacker Michael Morgan said. “We just lost a game. We’ve got to let them know we’re still Trojans and we’re going to fight. We talked about what happened, and we’ll be back.”

Carroll doesn’t pretend the Trojans aren’t disappointed by their slip in the national title race, but he also doesn’t intend to discuss such hypotheticals with his players.

The Trojans are “coming off a game that calls for us to kick into a gear that, unfortunately, over the years we’ve worked at kicking into,” Carroll said. “We have, from the [postgame] locker room on, have talked about how we’re going to come back together.”

After running the ball successfully early against the Huskies, USC failed to adjust when Washington made a wholesale commitment to stopping the run and dared Corp to beat them. Corp was a tentative 13 for 22 with an interception, and the Trojans managed 110 net yards passing after getting just 195 in the previous week’s victory at Ohio State.

Carroll doesn’t intend to change much about the Trojans’ game plan, however. With better execution and effort, he believes USC will get back in the hunt for its eighth straight Pac-10 title and BCS bowl berth — even if its national title hopes are faint.

“We go right back to who we are, what we know — playing good football,” Carroll said. “We get to come to the Coliseum to do it, and hopefully we’ll put together a great showing. It’s kind of the way we talk and act, and we don’t allow for anything other than that. It’s served us well over the years, we want to stay with it.”

Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.

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