Brandon Sosna discusses USC football scheduling strategy, Ole Miss contract

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While college football itself has been on pause the last couple months with players and coaches back at their homes navigating the ongoing pandemic, the business of college football continues in other ways.

For USC this past week, that meant announcing a home-and-home contract to play Ole Miss in 2025 and 2026 -- the first year in the Coliseum followed by the return game in Oxford, Miss.

USC senior associate athletic director/chief of staff Brandon Sosna joined the Trojan Talk podcast this week to discuss how that matchup with the Rebels came together and, more importantly, the Trojans' football scheduling strategy overall.

**Listen to the full podcast with Brandon Sosna and USC cornerback Chris Steele here**

"It's fun to talk about because I think the non-conference scheduling in football is just one of the more unique but also exciting components of the work that we do," Sosna said on the podcast. "I think as much as anything else, the Ole Miss series is a reflection of the decision-making framework that [USC athletic director Mike Bohn] and I believe in, which is simply to not constrain our thinking. We're going to evaluate every opportunity individually and on its own merits."

In regard to the Ole Miss contract, Sosna said he and Bohn were surprised that USC was behind pace on filling out future football schedules and that there was a need to add two games for the 2025 slate.

There is a database that most FBS programs use to upload their schedules so that athletic directors across the country can see who has openings or needs games and which schools might be a match. That's how Ole Miss came on the radar for Bohn and Sosna.

"Scheduling in football is done years and years and years in advance. There were games that we were talking about when we were at Cincinnati still that were late in the 2030s, which is sort of hard to believe because who knows what the landscape will even look like at that time. But when Mike and I arrived it wasn't an initial priority," Sosna said.

The first order of business when it came to football schedules was a more pressing response to fan frustration regarding the 2021 schedule and a contract to play FCS foe UC Davis. USC is one of just three FBS programs that have yet to play an FCS opponent -- along with rivals UCLA and Notre Dame -- since the Division I split in 1978. Bohn and Sosna worked to cancel that contract -- at a cost of $725,000, according to the LA Times -- and schedule San Jose State instead.