LOS ANGELES — They say speed kills, yes, but Zachariah Branch does not grant instant death. He waits. He processes. He lulls. And then, in a flash, he digs his cleat into turf with every Newton of force his 175-pound frame can muster.
And when Branch makes that decision to put his foot in the ground, as USC track and field coach Quincy Watts proclaims, the acceleration is something special. Unbelievable.
“That’s when you see,” Watts said, “the whooooo.”
On Sept. 1, the whooooo came somewhere around the 23-yard-line, when USC’s return ace caught a kickoff in a second-quarter knot with LSU and puttered for a few yards on Eco mode. Blocks lined up. Branch gave a little left-right one-two to LSU’s Kylin Jackson. He planted his left leg firm into Vegas turf.
And he was off, and looked gone, just a game into his sophomore season.
Except Branch’s young mind, sometimes, analyzes data even faster than his legs can churn. He had one man to beat, his mouthpiece bouncing against his facemask as a crowd of 60,000 swelled at his every step. And Branch simply approached too fast, caught between a juke. And thus, a 46-yard kickoff return ended in a tackle by LSU’s kicker, and Branch bounced up pounding his helmet in a mixture of elation and disgust.
That night, after the Trojans’ 27-20 win, Branch was texting with USC sprints coach John Bolton, the man who’d helped hone his speed for months on a rubber running track.
“I wish I woulda took that to the crib,” Branch wrote to Bolton.
More than two weeks later, it still haunted Branch, the USC receiver throwing his head back in exaggerated anguish Tuesday when asked about the tackle. Phewwww, he exhaled. These things stick in his psyche, a young man intent on pushing the extremes of how fast his legs can move and intent on results coming just as quickly.
Branch took the nation by storm last year in his first game of collegiate football, a true freshman All-American as a returner. In late July, he evaluated his first year at USC as simply “an OK season.”
“My goal is really just to elevate every year,” Branch said then, somehow turning up in the fall having cut his body fat from 6% to a near-inhuman 4.8%.
He has shown flashes of growth through two games in 2024, with that LSU kick return and an expanded role in USC’s passing game. It began in the winter and spring months, when Branch joined USC’s track and field program, a plan hatched since his recruitment. He competed in just a couple indoor meets. He didn’t run outdoor. But behind the scenes, he dissected and rebuilt his sprint mechanics, a kid who’d run a 10.33-second 100-meter dash as a sophomore in high school working with former Olympian gold-medalist Watts and Bolton.
The goal: to understand how he could use his speed to strategically manipulate the game of football itself.
“His continued investment in himself to be fast is translating over to football, and you’re seeing it,” Watts said. “And I can say – fast is fast. But then there’s real fast.”
“And Zach is going into another category, in terms of real fast.”
Front-side mechanics
After one workout in the spring, Branch plopped down on the track at USC and essentially passed out.
A few times, Bolton brought Branch in to train simultaneously with Fred Curley, an Olympian medalist coached by Bolton. Branch, naturally, poured himself into the session, and so Bolton ended up walking over by the high-jump pit and trying to revive his sprawled-out pupil.
“Zach, you good? You good?” Bolton asked, trying to help Branch up.
“I’m not ready to get up,” Branch repeated.
Before the spring, Watts sat down with USC’s strength and conditioning staff and developed a plan, with a goal to not overwork Branch. Overworking, though, would be difficult. He was a “track guy,” as Watts put it. His father, Sheva Branch, is the sprints and strength coach at Branch’s alma mater, Bishop Gorman in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Branch, though, came out of high school still with plenty of habits to correct. One of his biggest deficiencies, as Watts pointed out: an over-reliance on “backside mechanics” in his sprinting, leading to too much time spent on the ground.
“Which,” Watts explained, “equals slow.”
So in the spring, coaches would lay out about seven or eight ankle-high “banana hurdles” at intervals along the track. In workouts, Branch would be instructed to attack the drill as fast as he could. If he nicked a hurdle, Watts explained, it meant his feet were spending too much time on the ground. And quick feet, and no hurdles displaced, meant a better shift to front-side mechanics.
Watts has worked with a bevy of dual-sport football athletes – Adoreé Jackson, Marqise Lee, Ronald Jones – at USC. And the game plan for Branch, Watts said, was similar: Train during the springs on the track, and the game would slow down for Branch in the fall.
And the very notion that Branch hasn’t hit his ceiling, with speed, is baffling to even his teammates.
“I don’t know how much faster he can really get,” quarterback Miller Moss said Tuesday, “before he’s running the Olympics.”
Force application
In November 2021, Liberty High coach Richard Muraco went into his program’s state semifinal showdown with Bishop Gorman with a concrete plan: Do not send out the punt team, under any circumstance, to kick the ball to Zachariah Branch.
If they ever got to a fourth-down situation, Muraco figured, he’d simply send the offense out and have quarterback Jayden Maiava – now Moss’ backup at USC — take a snap and quick-kick downfield. Except on an early third down, Maiava was sacked and tweaked his leg.
“I’m like, ‘Ah, (expletive),’” Muraco remembered.
Muraco pulled Maiava, sent out his punt team on fourth down, and Branch promptly returned one to the house.
He has racked opposing coaches with fear for much of his life, with a special acceleration the product of a concept Watts calls “force application.” Speed, for sprinters, is created when athletes focus on attacking with force to the ground to propel forward momentum, maintaining an even balance from foot to track.
In the spring, as he honed that concept of force application in his work with Watts, Branch was intentional about incorporating such technique into football movements. If he took a handoff, Watts explained, made a cut and planted his foot in the ground – in the same way he’d explode out of his breaks on the track – Branch would now be more efficient in his movements.
It’s a particularly important concept as a receiver, the greatest area of growth for Branch after a somewhat inconsistent freshman season in the pass game. In late November, Riley pointed to Branch’s route speed as “very important in our offense,” a concept that incorporates physical speed and Branch’s mental processing, reading defenses to deteriorate his routes quicker.
“That’s something I’ve been trying to translate into my game,” Branch said during fall camp. “Soon as I get the ball, make a move in space, stay low if I have to. And then once I see green grass, then I get tall, and try to open up like a track runner.”
And the way Branch grasped the sheer science of his speed, and such track-to-football translation, captivated his coaches.
“Zach,” Bolton said, “is probably one of the most intelligent guys I’ve ever worked with.”
Stride frequency
Growing up, his son’s greatest challenge was patience, father Sheva reflected last fall.
Everything, Sheva would explain to Branch growing up, isn’t a race.
His very nature is a paradox, an athlete with a limitless ceiling built on limitless speed, and yet in all areas sometimes needing to simply slow down. Branch’s mechanics, too, carry that same paradox: One of Bolton’s main points with Branch this spring was an emphasis on staying relaxed in his movements.
With relaxation comes efficiency. In the spring, Bolton worked often with Branch on what he called “stride frequency.” They ran drills, trying to refine the exact number of steps Branch took exploding out of the blocks in his first 10 meters: ideally, seven. Maybe 7.2.
The rationale, applying to football, is simple. Often, corners will play seven yards or more off Branch, Bolton said. He could catch a pass, eat up yardage quickly and efficiently, then make a cut without ever truly tapping into his “energy system,” Bolton said.
The offseason work is there, plain in the acceleration in his cuts – that zip at the 23-yard-line against LSU – and yet Branch’s breakout hasn’t quite come. He hasn’t scored in two games, a surefire touchdown pass from the two-yard line against Utah State tipping right through his hands. That drop, too, has stuck with him, turning over in his mind daily throughout USC’s bye the previous week.
“Guys came up to me and was like, ‘You good’” Branch said of the drop Tuesday, “trying to encourage me. But I’m not good, you know?”
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After Branch’s texts following the LSU game, Bolton attempted to reassure him there was a lot of football left to play. An entire three months remain, and at least a year beyond that, before Branch hits the NFL future most every evaluator around USC sees for him.
And when Branch begins training for the NFL combine, Bolton has offered his services, sensing a chance to smash Xavier Worthy’s 4.21-second combine record in the 40-yard-dash.
“The goal is for Zach to get 4.1,” Bolton said. “That’s the goal.”
“And I think he can do it, too.”