LOS ANGELES — How do you think the USC football team is going to fare this season?
Yeah, I don’t know either.
Neither do the Trojans, if we’re being honest.
Gone is the swashbuckling bravado of the 2023 preseason, the assuredness of a team that expected and was expected to compete for a national title. That would enter the season ranked No. 6 in preseason polling after going 11-3 in head coach Lincoln Riley’s first season, a splashy entrance and compelling return for USC to college football’s upper echelon.
“If you don’t think you can be the best in the country, then there ain’t no reason to be here,” linebacker Eric Gentry told us at media day last fall, echoing many of his teammates’ thoughts at the time. “So that’s why I really feel like it’s all in this year.”
This week, about all I was hearing from Gentry’s teammates was cautious optimism and realistic expectations.
Reasonable goal-setting from a team that will be heavily scrutinized even though it finished last season outside of the Associated Press Top 25: “Just being ourselves,” wide receiver Kyron Hudson said. “… not being too high, not being too low.”
“You don’t want to put a specific benchmark to it,” said Gavin Meyer, a defensive tackle who is sure, however, that the defensive line will be setting the tone.
“Just have fun with it, have no regrets at the end of the season,” safety Anthony Beavers Jr. said. “That’ll help us be as successful as possible.”
“Just dominating,” offensive lineman Emmanuel Pregnon said, “by putting one foot in front of the other.”
Of all the players who shared their perspectives with me when I asked at Wednesday’s media day what would make for a successful season, only newcomer Akili Arnold mentioned a national championship: “That’s why me and Easton (Mascarenas-Arnold) came here,” Arnold said, referencing his stepbrother, who transferred in with him from Oregon State.
That’s respectable, but so was all the other Trojans saying all the right things – all the boring things. Not as fun, perhaps, but after USC limped through the finish line last season, losers of six of its final eight games, understandable.
Because, at this point, the known unknowns outweigh even a roster filled with significantly bulked-up ballers.
New conference, who dis? The big fish so many times in the Pac-12 pond, it’s anybody’s guess what role will the Trojans play when they take the Big Ten stage for the first time?
They’ll obviously audition for the lead: “We are at the top of the Big Ten,” Riley said at their new conference’s media day on July 24. “We’re at the top of any conference. I don’t ever look at ourselves as below anybody. And never will.”
But in the next breath, he also let it be known that he’d settle for a smaller part. For now. And for whatever apparently unknowable amount of time it might take his Trojans to play catchup with the behemoths of the Big Ten.
Asked Lincoln Riley in a scrum at Big Ten Media Day about the recruiting strength of Ohio State + Oregon and USC’s long-term vision with being able to compete at the top of the Big Ten.
“We are at the top of the Big Ten conference. I mean, we’re at the top of any conference.” pic.twitter.com/vm00t11fe3
— Luca Evans (@bylucaevans) July 24, 2024
“It takes time,” Riley told reporters in Indianapolis. “I’m not a magician. I can’t wave a magic wand and everything be perfect right away. But find one area where we haven’t made progress. It’s coming.”
And progress isn’t linear, the Trojans have reminded us – though we’ll finally get to see a Riley team start a season without his pal Alex Grinch directing the defense, and that should be a step in the right direction in terms of slowing opponents’ forward progress.
We’ll all venture out together on a sturdy limb and assume that swapping the embattled defensive coordinator for rising star D’Anton Lynn will help the Trojans hold opponents to fewer than the 34.38 points they averaged per game last season, 118th in college football.
But we can’t know how much better a defense will be until we see it – and against Big Ten competition, no less.
And no one can say for sure whether the Trojans’ offense – without the human cheat code that is Caleb Williams at the controls – can competently complement a potentially improved defense.
They’ll plug in Miller Moss in place of a Heisman Trophy winner and No. 1 overall NFL pick. Yes, Moss has a good group of receivers to target. And, for the moment, some momentum after he threw for 372 yards and six touchdowns in the Holiday Bowl, his first start.
But such a small sample isn’t sufficient evidence to draw conclusions or inspire lofty proclamations – not anymore.
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Two seasons ago it was. Remember when Riley was bolder with even less intel, before he had even coached a down at USC? In 2022, he started a sentence at media day with predictable coach-speak – “in some respects you keep the long game in mind” – and followed it, in the next breath, by saying the quiet part very loudly.
“We didn’t come here to play for second,” Riley said, setting the tone for what became a thrilling 2022 turnaround for the Trojans, who were coming off a 4-8 campaign. “We are not wired that way. We came here competitively to win championships, win them now and to win them for a long time.”
Now, two years later, the tenor has changed, and maybe the immediate goal has too. Because winning championships? It’s not easy, and it can take time; it can take a long time. And Riley is a football coach and not a magician.
But there’s also something to what Christian Pierce, the sophomore safety from Fontana, had to say about what success looks like to him this season.
“It looks like our team taking us exactly where we want to go,” he said. “We have more than enough talent … our coaches, our staff is phenomenal. Where our team decides we want to go, that’s where were gonna end up being.”
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