LOS ANGELES — It’s difficult to discuss USC without doing so through the lens of what the football program is in theory.

The history, the national championships, the Heisman Trophy winners, the Los Angeles market, the access to local talent, the weather, the resources. It’s hard not to think of what the program could be.

Never mind that over the past 45 years — except for an exhilarating seven-year stretch under Pete Carroll — this potential has largely failed to match reality on the field. This holds even as USC enters its fourth season under Lincoln Riley, who arrived in Los Angeles with the expectation of returning the proud program to national prominence.

For the better part of a decade, USC’s recruiting could’ve been framed the same way. The Trojans have all the ingredients to be elite — and were for a long period — but have squandered that potential due to a lack of alignment, a lack of a plan and ineffective coaching, among other factors. Over the past seven years, the Trojans have had as many recruiting classes rank in the top 10 (two) as they’ve had finish outside the top 50 (two). Riley has signed just one top-10 class in his tenure.

But now, armed with a top-down commitment to organizational alignment, a general manager with a tangible roster-building plan and a newfound aggression in the name, image and likeness space, USC has dominated offseason headlines and roared back to a familiar spot — the top five of the national recruiting rankings. With the early signing period four months away, the Trojans’ class ranks second nationally in the 247Sports Composite.

“Everyone knows the potential of USC,” general manager Chad Bowden said earlier this month. “I think they understand the giant’s awake now.”

As one Power 4 assistant general manager said, USC is finally acting like it should. But even as recruiting prospers, legitimate questions still linger.

Fresh off an 11-win debut season in 2022, Riley was equipped with proof of concept — or so it seemed.

“In my mind, we’re going to have more talented teams going forward,” Riley said that December as the Trojans signed a recruiting class that ranked No. 8 nationally. “In reality, I think when we look back 10 years from now, this will probably be in some ways the least-talented teams we have.”

As the 2025 season nears, USC isn’t dramatically more talented than it was in 2022 — if at all. Riley has elevated the program’s talent floor. There are fewer bad players than there were in his first year. But the ceiling isn’t considerably higher. The Trojans’ win total has decreased each year since, from 11 to eight in 2023 and seven in 2024.

USC enters the season with a roster that feels like it’s in Year 1 of a rebuild. Except it’s Year 4. The offensive line is a major concern. There are talented playmakers at receiver and linebacker, but there is a concerning lack of depth. Cornerback remains a question mark. Riley has coached three Heisman Trophy-winning quarterbacks. With his reputation, that position was supposed to provide certainty. Instead, USC is entering its second consecutive season without an elite starter.

The roster is at its current state largely because the program was unprepared for the NIL world. USC was resistant to collectives even though it was clear that’s where the landscape was headed. Its own in-house NIL initiative, BLVD, was never embraced by the fan base and eventually shut down nine months after launch. When collectives did sprout up, there were too many, which created confusion among donors.

USC hired GM Chad Bowden (right) in January to oversee the program’s roster construction, allowing Lincoln Riley to focus exclusively on coaching. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Per conversations with people close to USC’s NIL efforts, Mike Bohn, the athletic director at the time, wasn’t prepared to navigate the ever-evolving financial model. Plus, there wasn’t a huge appetite from the university — riddled by several scandals over the previous decade — to give millions of dollars to high school recruits.

That doesn’t absolve Riley from blame. High-end defensive recruits did not want to play for defensive coordinator Alex Grinch. Aside from that, the coaching staff simply didn’t recruit as well as it needed to.

Riley recruited Southern California well when he was Oklahoma’s head coach. But until this current recruiting cycle, the program seemed reluctant to prioritize its own backyard — a philosophy that puzzled other programs.

“Their problem is they’re not recruiting California — they’re recruiting the whole nation,” a Power 4 personnel staffer said at the time. “Why? They’re in one of the most talented hotbeds in the country.”

Jen Cohen’s arrival as USC’s athletic director in August 2023 proved to be a turning point. Cohen, hired away from Washington, provided Riley with the necessary resources to bolster his staff. When Grinch flamed out as defensive coordinator during the 2023 season, Riley had the financial runway to make a significant offer to UCLA DC D’Anton Lynn and hire a strong staff of defensive assistants. USC stepped up again when Lynn’s alma mater, Penn State, came calling this past offseason, and the school signed him to a handsome extension.

The House settlement, approved this summer, allows universities to directly pay student-athletes $20.5 million for the 2025-26 academic year through revenue sharing. Cohen hasn’t shared many details publicly about USC’s revenue-sharing strategies but emphasized in an interview with The Athletic in February that football will be the top priority. It’s expected that USC, like most schools, is allocating 75 percent (roughly $15.4 million) of the total to football.

“The first (guiding principle) is ensuring championship-level football,” Cohen said. “That is a huge part of who we are at USC, and football is the big economic engine of our athletic department. It allows for us to do a lot for a lot of other programs and students, so we are prioritizing that in our planning.”

USC has also invested in its facilities, with the Bloom Football Performance Center expected to open in 2026 at a cost of more than $200 million. The athletic department isn’t skimping on anything in its quest to get the football program to where it needs to be — and that includes spending top dollar for the personnel department.

The Trojans had a GM in place the past few seasons, Dave Emerick, a longtime Mike Leach confidant whose relationship with Riley dates back to when he was an assistant coach under Leach at Texas Tech in the 2000s.

Emerick joined the program in June 2022, but that was before the GM role had morphed into what it is now — someone who builds a roster, handles NIL conversations, negotiates contracts, engages with donors and deals with university politics.

Emerick was a key figure in Riley’s makeover of USC’s defensive coaching staff after the 2023 season. But as USC lost some high-profile recruiting battles, Emerick became a target for some frustrated fans who blamed those losses on NIL — justified or not.

Handling NIL negotiations and dealing with agents wasn’t what Emerick was hired to do, and it wasn’t the best use of his skill set. So USC conducted an extensive search for a new general manager last year. The Trojans made an aggressive offer to Alabama’s Courtney Morgan, who worked with Cohen at Washington, last summer before they eventually hired Bowden away from Notre Dame in January, just days after the Fighting Irish played for the national championship.

The plan was simple: Get more out of Riley by having him do less. Bowden would handle the day-to-day aspects of recruiting, NIL negotiations and roster management, while Riley would be able to focus on coaching the football team.

Shortly after his arrival, Bowden bolstered USC’s front office/personnel infrastructure, adding Dre Brown from Illinois as assistant general manager, Max Stienecker from Wisconsin as executive director of player personnel and Zaire Turner from Notre Dame as assistant athletic director for recruiting operations. He also made it a point to build relationships with donors and attack the fundraising aspect of the role.

With the front office in place now, there’s better organization across the board. Time will tell if the plan works, but at least there is one. USC will fight to keep Southern California’s best prospects home, and Bowden has often said that the program will major in high school recruiting and minor in the portal.

Everything had to align properly for USC’s recruiting to return to elite status — an AD who can navigate the rapidly changing waters of college athletics, a GM who has a vision and a coach who is willing to step aside and let his personnel staff handle the roster.

There was one more critical component that came into focus this offseason.

Bowden was sold on the program’s potential after his first conversation with Cohen.

“She told me about her plan and USC’s plan and the future of NIL and how aggressive we were going to be,” he said. “I could just see it in her eyes, everything she said she believed in.”

Alignment is often utilized as a buzzword in college athletics, but it’s clear when an athletic department or university doesn’t have it — and USC didn’t have it.

Cohen tackled that head-on. That meant educating donors on what NIL actually is — how it could be the difference between a student-athlete in an Olympic sport being on a half scholarship vs. a full ride, and why a strong NIL foundation was necessary to compete at the highest levels — as well as building and maintaining relationships with those stakeholders.

Third-party collectives such as The Tommy Group and Conquest Collective had popped up, but Cohen was able to direct a lot of support to House of Victory, which was the university-backed, alumni-led donor collective.

That eliminated some confusion. House of Victory remains a third-party collective, even though collectives have moved in-house at some universities since revenue sharing was implemented.

House of Victory tripled its NIL budget for the football program during Cohen’s first full year as athletic director. Money was not an issue.

“This is what college football looks like in 2025,” said a person involved with the school’s NIL and revenue-sharing efforts, who was granted anonymity because they’re not authorized to publicly speak on the topic. “And if we want to be great, we have to change how we’re doing things too.”

The future role of NIL — due to ongoing interpretations of the House settlement — is unclear, but USC believes it is well-positioned to remain an industry leader.

“Our aspirations for what we’re going to do in NIL are as high as anyone in the country, and I hope people know it,” Bowden said in March.

The Los Angeles market has always been part of USC’s recruiting pitch but could now be an even bigger selling point, with the ability to present far more lucrative and “legitimate” NIL opportunities for the school’s athletes. This should help with both high school recruits and transfers.

Change has never scared us.

Now more than ever… this is #thepLAcetobe 🌇📈 pic.twitter.com/BbssXmTxnk

— USC Football ✌️ (@uscfb) June 7, 2025

Riley’s best class, in 2023, ranked eighth nationally. His past two classes have ranked 17th (2024) and 13th (2025), respectively, which is good but not elite. Riley is getting paid around $10 million per year to build an elite program.

USC’s 2026 class includes 32 commitments, which contributes to the high ranking, but the average player rating is a very solid 92.17 (seventh nationally and improved considerably from last year’s 90.05).

Importantly, the class is filled with some of the best prospects from Southern California and features 10 top-100 recruits. USC signed a total of nine top-100 prospects over the past three recruiting cycles combined.

“(Bowden is) easy to deal with. Direct,” said an agent who has represented several recruits in contract negotiations with USC over the years. “I think one of the biggest things with USC previously was the lack of direct answers. They kind of let people land in the gray, and there wasn’t a real buy-in and commitment to it. Now there’s a plan and buy-in across the board from Jen Cohen on down.”

There is a narrative on social media that USC has built its 2026 class on grandiose financial offers. Bowden begs to differ.

“First off, we’re not (landing) these players based on a bag,” he said. “Everyone reports about money and stuff. That’s not why we’re getting players. That’s not why. You talk to our recruits, they’ll tell you that’s not why.”

Jonas Williams, a four-star quarterback from Illinois, was the first recruit to commit after Bowden was hired. “I don’t really think it matters what people say about a recruiting class,” said Williams, who originally committed to Oregon. “They’re not the ones sitting there recruiting these guys and in the meetings with their parents and their families. There’s so much more to it, so I don’t think that matters.”

Despite the program’s relative struggles in recent years, USC still has a lot to sell. Quarterbacks and skill players like playing for Riley; the defensive staff has a lot of NFL experience; and Bowden has done a very good job (in a short amount of time) of building relationships in Southern California.

Whether the strong NIL setup is the driving force behind the class is up for debate, but it’s certainly helped.

“It’s always hard to recruit against them, especially in Southern California because they have a great program, great history, and a lot of kids grow up wanting to play for them,” said a P4 assistant coach who has recruited against USC during the 2026 cycle and several times over the past decade. “Now, you add the financial component to it where they’re really aggressive obviously … that’s also part of the challenge.”

The 2026 recruiting class may be the clearest example to date of USC flexing its financial muscles, but Bowden wants to make one thing abundantly clear.

“I didn’t recruit the kids who are currently on the roster, but I promise you this, they mean absolutely everything to me,” he said. “There’s nothing more important to me than the guys on this team.”

After all, the 2025 roster will ultimately set the foundation for what Bowden is trying to build. Starting next Saturday — when the Trojans host Missouri State — the focus will turn to them. Will this be another year in which USC makes a lot of noise in the offseason only to falter once the games start?

It’s a critical season for Riley, who is just 15-11 over the past two years. If he posts a third consecutive underwhelming season, will USC be able to keep this class together? And even if it does, there is still plenty of work ahead for the Trojans as they try to build out this roster. Fans point to 2026 as the expected breakthrough because of all the potential incoming talent, but relying on freshmen in the Big Ten is a fool’s errand. It will take several classes stacked together to get the roster to an elite level.

And where would a subpar season leave Riley? His buyout — believed to be north of $70 million — makes a coaching change unlikely.

If you’re a USC fan, the good news is your program is operating like a real blue blood once again — at least in one department.

“It’s a lot like USC as a whole,” Riley said when asked about the NIL turnaround. “There’s a lot of potential, but potential is one thing. It’s actually seeing it all come together … people really getting behind it and saying it’s going to be a priority. The school’s done that. Our staff has done that. Now, the Trojan family on the outside has started to do that. This is just the tip of the iceberg.”

Now, it’s on Riley to make sure the on-field product catches up.

(Top photo of Lincoln Riley: Junfu Han / USA Today Network via Imagn Images)