Although it's the bye week, USC has mostly kept its usual routine and schedule, and that meant on Thursday morning coach Lincoln Riley joined reporters over Zoom for his final availability of the week.

Riley assessed the physicality of his team through the first seven games, named a handful of players he thinks are "really close" to earning bigger roles, talked about the role of play-action in his offensive scheme, the development of rush end Korey Foreman, kicker Denis Lynch's emergence this fall and more.

Here is a full transcript of Riley's comments Thursday:

How have you felt about the physicality of the team through the first half after having one offseason and summer to put in your strength program?

"Great strides there. I feel like it’s been a strength of this team up to this point. Which is – from where we started in January, I know I shared with you guys on multiple occasions, that was a – I would say, a concern. That was something we knew we had to really make some big strides in, both with the players we had and really just the physical development of the entire team. But I think you’ve seen us be pretty productive here through seven games on both fronts. Put ourselves in a position to win every single game. Ran the ball for the most part pretty well. We’ve done a pretty good job against the run – any run issues we had first half of the season weren’t necessarily physical. It was a little bit more of playing sound. We’ve been a physical team. We’ve hit. We’ve hit. We’ve hit people and knocked the ball loose. We’ve held onto the ball. We’ve run aggressively with the ball. We finished a lot of big plays. I think we made some big strides. I think Bennie and his staff deserve a lot of credit, the bodies that we’re playing with have changed a lot in a short amount of time. Strength and nutrition training staff, all those people, really did a nice job. Guys bought in there. We physically proved a lot in a relatively short window."