After nine days of chaos and uncertainty, during which 19 of his players left USC for the transfer portal, Lincoln Riley found himself longing Wednesday for a time, not so long ago, when the process of building a college football team was less opaque, teams were equally allotted 85 scholarships, relationships were forged in living rooms and decisions were made with more than money in mind.
But now, Riley lamented, that was long gone. In its place was a colder, more professional model, with much less clarity for all parties involved. College football, he said, was now “more of a business than it’s ever been.”
“I don’t think any of us could have predicted, I guess, just how quickly it has changed, how fundamentally it has changed,” Riley said. “I think the whole college football world is trying to adapt right now, which is, honestly, I think for everybody a little difficult to keep up with.”
That world had never felt so far away at USC as it had last week, as former top prospects whose living rooms the coach once sat in left in droves for the transfer portal. Among them were two five-star receivers in Zachariah Branch and Duce Robinson, both of which were seen as two of the coach’s biggest recruiting victories at USC, as well as Branch’s older brother, Zion, himself a top-60 recruit in the 2022 class.
Those departures unleashed a torrent of criticism of Riley, who has now lost nine of the 12 top-100 recruits he signed in the 2022 and 2023 classes, including all four of the five-star recruits he’d signed.
“Are we adapting? Certainly,” Riley said. “Are some of the decisions we made a few years ago — would we have made those in this current climate? No, we definitely would have done different things.”
To Riley, there was a clear-cut explanation for the exodus. Many of the portal decisions made over the last week, Riley suggested Wednesday, had largely come down to money. And it wasn’t just players making “business decisions” either.
“There’s a financial component to every decision that we make,” Riley said, “and every decision that a player makes.”
And those decisions affect other decisions.
“Now, you overpay for the wrong person,” Riley said, “it affects every other one on the roster.”
So to settle on its approach, USC’s staff met in the offseason with consultants from the NFL, as well as “people in the business world,” to better understand how to best disperse its budget. They settled on a system that affixes percentage values of the cap to certain positions, with the intent of navigating a market that is constantly moving, with limited transparency surrounding how much players are actually offered at other schools.
After that, Riley said, determining a player’s value has “got to come back to production for the USC football program.”
But how Riley quantifies that production remains unclear. Four of the 10 offensive players who received the most snaps in USC’s offense this season have since entered the portal, including three of the Trojans’ five highest-producing receivers.
“Everybody is having to determine where they place value — on certain positions, on certain people. That’s just the nature of it. The NFL has been doing it forever. You see the discussion on how much you pay a starting quarterback in the NFL. How much is a running back worth? How much is a receiver worth? If a guy has this type of production, then what percentage of a salary cap does that entitle him to? Or does that make sense for the program to be able to give to them? It’s very cut and dry. It’s very production-based.”
Still, the results of USC’s approach has stirred panic this week within an already frustrated Trojan fan base. As potential transfer options came and went without committing, fans’ impatience has only heightened with each passing day of the portal. So far, the Trojans have signed just two transfers — San Jose State cornerback DJ Harvey and New Mexico running back Eli Sanders — while many transfer targets have committed elsewhere.
Riley, however, insists he’s unfazed by the results so far.
“I’ve learned to not really carry any emotion with it,” Riley said. “I don’t get too high or too low when good news comes across my desk or tough news comes across my desk. I think it’s my job to stay steady and stay committed to the vision.”
Hanson gets help
It had been a whirlwind few weeks for Zach Hanson, with a new baby at home and the transfer portal rolling at work, when Riley called the Trojans tight ends coach into the office. Josh Henson had just left to become the offensive coordinator at Purdue, and Hanson, Riley told him, was who he wanted to replace him.
Riley took less than 24 hours to decide on his new offensive line coach. And it took Hanson even less time to decide.
“It took me about two seconds,” Hanson said.
Hanson, who played offensive tackle at Kansas State, spent most of his career prior to USC coaching offensive lines, not tight ends. The transition, he said, would bring him back to the role that’s “most natural to me.”
He was set to inherit a line that was expected to replace three starters, before one made an unexpected decision this week.
Guard Emmanuel Pregnon had already committed to play in next month’s Shrine Bowl, an indication that he was likely to declare for the NFL. But the Trojans’ most consistent lineman changed his mind.
Hanson won’t have to worry about his left tackle leaving, either. In light of Henson’s exit, sophomore Elijah Paige was asked if he wavered at all on his commitment to staying at USC.
“Not at all,” Paige said.