USC opened fall camp Friday morning, breaking in its new expanded practice field area and officially starting the countdown to the 2024 season.

It was also the Trojans' first official day as members of the Big Ten Conference.

After practice, coach Lincoln Riley talked about his takeaways from Day 1, the challenge he made to the defense coming out of the spring, the returns on the offseason strength program (1,400 pounds gained collectively since January), the state of USC's NIL support, the new practice field and ongoing project for the new football performance center, the state of the QB position and more.

Watch the full interview here and scroll down for a complete transcript of his comments.

RELATED: Watch scenes from USC's first practice Friday | Photo gallery from practice

How pleased are you with today?

"Yeah, it was a big day, lot new out here today. New team, obviously lot of new staff members, new field, new conference -- other than that it was all the same. Yeah, fun to get to this day for a lot of reasons. Guys were really excited, guys really flew around. I was really impressed even without seeing the film, you can tell defensively there was already a different comfort level then certainly when we opened or maybe even when we closed spring. We challenged our defensive players that we didn't want to just pick up where we left off -- we wanted to accelerate so that when we got here that even this first day it looked even better than it did in the spring at any point. That has been just a big point for us throughout the offseason of preparing ourselves to come in here and don't just be satisfied with picking up where we left off. I thought that we did that. Guys flew around.

"Obviously, we have some limitations on what you can do when you're non-padded, but I thought we handled the day well, lot of great energy and juice and excited to get back in there and watch the film."

Is the defense ahead of the offense?

"It's fair. I mean, it's typically that. For us right now, it's not so much offense vs. defense. It's a little bit more of just evaluating each individual player, each unit and then each side of the ball -- are we executing and doing the things we need to do and what are the gaps we need to close. There's always certainly competition, you obviously pay attention to that. That's a hallmark of this program, has been for a long time. But you gotta have some perspective on what you're building. We're not building a defense to only beat USC's offense. We're not building an offense to only beat USC's defense. There's a much bigger picture and we've got to all balance that."

At Big Ten Media Day you emphasized patience -- in your eyes when will this program be firing on all cylinders?

"There's no patience -- it's just an understanding of it is what it is. Our patience, we want it to happen yesterday and that's been our mentality from the day we walked in here. Despite all the things we knew we had to build, you guys probably most of you were there the day I got hired, I sat up there and said 'Championships are going to be the deal from the beginning' and everybody looked at me like I was crazy and nobody thought it was possible. And we put ourselves right there. So yeah, no limitations on what we can do. There's definitely no patience. There's an incredible sense of urgency, but you also understand that the key is everybody involved, we can't ever get down when one thing doesn't go perfect because the path, it's not going to be perfect. I think it's more just an understanding of that. It's going to continually build, it's going to continually grow, we're going to build on and celebrate the successes and try to replicate and get as many of those as we can, and when we have something that doesn't go our way we're going to use it as a chance to learn, it's going to motivate us more and we're going to fix it and we're going to get better.

"One of those two things is going to happen, and that's how we're going to respond no matter what. "Our history as a staff tells us and confirms when you continually do that, you build and that's what we're doing."