Perhaps more than ever, the range of opinions and expectations for what USC football is and can be in 2025 is vast and varied.

Are the Trojans on an irreversible spiral into mediocrity under Lincoln Riley and in this new era of college football after going from 11 wins in his first year to 8 and then 7 the last two seasons?

Or is the infrastructure Riley rebuilt on the defensive side and in the Trojans' personnel department impactful enough to be the foundation for championship hopes in the near future?

Is Riley the esteemed and venerated play-caller he's built his reputation and career upon, or did the offensive setbacks last year reveal major questions about his ability to function without a Heisman candidate quarterback?

Ultimately, is USC doomed for more disappointing in 2025 or a realistic College Football Playoff contender? Survey the fan base and you'll find plenty of voices on both ends of that spectrum.

In our first First-and-10 column of 2025, we attempt to answer all those questions as best we can after an in-depth scrutiny and analysis of exactly what went wrong last season and a realistic and honest look at how the Trojans are built for the year ahead.

The narratives that define college football programs are borne from the eternal dance between expectations and outcomes. For the USC Trojans, it’s been a while since that dance has been well choreographed.

Most came into the 2024 season expecting Lincoln Riley’s squad to lose a handful of games and miss the playoffs, but few could have foreseen the particular trajectory this team took on its way to a 7-6 finish. Despite the departure of a generational talent at quarterback, most observers predicted that Riley’s offense could be counted on to continue flourishing. Meanwhile, following two disastrous defensive seasons and a total revamping of the staff on that side of the ball, doubts persisted about whether or not the USC defense would be capable of handling its first season of Big Ten play.

To the surprise of many, it turned out to be the Trojans defense which kept the team in position to win games more often than not, while failures of the offense at critical junctures cost them dearly.

USC’s 2024 schedule was a grueling one, and there was good reason to expect the team to find itself outmatched against a bevy of tough opponents. Perhaps the most perplexing fact about this past season of Trojans football was the fact that this turned out not to be the case. Riley’s squad proved itself capable of battling to the last minute against every single opponent on the schedule, defeating two competitive SEC squads, nearly taking down the defending national champions on the road and playing two eventual CFP semifinal contenders down to the wire.

There’s a very strong argument to be made that this team was far more competitive than almost anyone could have dreamed in the 2024 offseason, but the problem remained that this level of quality did not correlate to victory. The Trojans dropped far too many games against inferior opponents, each of which saw them squander clear opportunities to finish with wins. As we look back upon the 2024 Trojans in retrospect, this leaves us with a rather murky picture from which to draw.

What allowed this team to compete against elite opposition, and what prevented it from winning games that were well in hand? The answers are complicated, requiring an analysis of personnel, decision-making and team culture. With the evidence of a full season and postseason now at our disposal, I’ll try to examine what made this peculiar team the way it was in 2024 and go on to project where those answers leave USC in 2025.

One of the primary criticisms levied at Lincoln Riley’s teams and the USC program over the course of many years has been the overarching allegation of softness. That’s been characterized by shoddy tackling, poor play along the lines of scrimmage, and most critically, an inability to conjure a fiery edge in late game situations. Over the course of Riley’s first two seasons at USC, those concerns persisted as the Trojans shrank in big moments and frequently found themselves imposed upon by more physical squads. From the outside, those qualities came to be indicative of the basic nature of Riley’s teams, an inherent and defining indictment of the character of his program. As most fans of the sport are well aware, teams with such foundation are not built for success.

The overhaul on the defensive side of the ball last offseason was a concerted effort to begin remedying both the reality and the perception of this characterization, but most expected that such a process would be slow, if at all successful. In what might be the single biggest development of the 2024 season for USC, it turned out that this change of character was in fact actualized both rapidly and effectively.

On the field, this was most easily noticeable in the changes to the Trojans defense. Though the team’s personnel on that side of the ball was not talented enough to perform at an elite level as a whole, the energy with which the group played was vastly improved even to the untrained eye. D’Anton Lynn’s unit largely played defense “the right way,” with all 11 players looking to fly to the ball on most downs, a heightened emphasis on proper tackling across the board, and a consistently effective set of schematic answers to whatever the opposition tried to throw at them. Despite deploying many of the same players as in previous years (including some of the team’s worst offenders), Lynn’s unit improved its missed tackle rate by 20% when compared to the USC defenses fielded in Riley’s first two years. The overall determination to play the right way and make stops in big moments was marked by the defense’s enormous improvement on third down, where USC finished the year ranked 21st nationally (33.5-percent conversion rate for opponents) after sitting at a paltry 106th (43.6 percent) to end the previous season. The dramatic improvement on that side of the ball allowed the Trojans to play a different brand of football game from the high-scoring shootouts that characterized the past two seasons.

When those contests were not going their way, the Trojans frequently faltered over the final stages, collapsing as the team demonstrated a palpable lack of fight and cohesion. Partially buoyed by the functionality of the defense, the 2024 Trojans looked very different when placed in difficult situations. In multiple contests against highly-talented teams, USC fought back from double-digit deficits in the second half to challenge for victory up to the final whistle. Not all of those efforts resulted in victories, including crushing losses to Michigan and Notre Dame. But others did -- including big-time comeback wins over LSU and Texas A&M that would have been unthinkable for the previous iterations of this team. There was not a single game this season where it could be said that the Trojans did not fight to the last breath with the utmost of energy and determination; all of their losses were decided by one score in the final minutes with the exception of Notre Dame, and even in that game USC was just 20 yards from completing a comeback to tie the game with just about 3 minutes remaining.

Of course, the various issues that plagued this team still prevented it from securing victory as often as it should have. Six losses is far too many, especially when so many of those came in games that the Trojans almost certainly should have won. The point I’m making, however, is that this was a team with both the physical capability and the resolve of spirit to fight for the positive outcome to the end of every contest, and that simply could not have been said of USC’s teams for many years to date.

The team’s performance in the Las Vegas Bowl against Texas A&M was the perfect encapsulation of this transition. Coming into that game without a bevy of key contributors and bearing all the disappointment of a six-loss season, there was every reason for the remaining players to have approached that game lacking a full competitive fire. After a deeply disheartening start to the contest, USC was down by 17 points with less than half of the third quarter remaining. Given the total mess of the Trojans’ quarterbacking to that point, there was little cause for the remainder of the team to maintain much hope in the possibility of a comeback in the remaining 20 minutes or so. And yet, the Trojans did not waver for a second on either side of the ball. The defense kept fighting to generate key stops, while the skill players and offensive line continued to give their best efforts to support the quarterback. Despite the enormity of his struggles to that point, Jayden Maiava himself continued undeterred, remaining aggressive in his search for a rhythm in the passing game. When it mattered most in the closing phases of the game, he found one. The combined efforts of he, the rest of the offense, and the defense pulled the Trojans to a remarkably improbable victory in the final seconds, writing an unexpectedly positive finish to the season’s story and entrenching the fact of the group’s resilience.

There’s plenty about this football team that still requires fixing, but there’s no denying that the character of this program evolved for the better this season. From the first game of the year to the last, the players and coaches on this team maintained a fierce desire to win and demonstrated it with their cohesion, focus and effort. For my money, that’s much harder to attain than the more tangible improvements that this program still needs to make, and one that will be worth more for USC’s long-term prospects if it can be maintained.

Plenty of adjectives indicative of frustration and disappointment can justly be used to describe USC football in 2024, but soft should not be counted among them.

Now to get into some of those frustrating and disappointing elements of the Trojans’ 2024 season. By and large, I have to say off the bat that most of these issues can be laid at the feet of Riley as the head coach. We will discuss later some of the external factors that may have put him in an unfavorable position to manage these issues and whether we think he might be working to remedy them going forward, but for now, the buck has to stop with him when evaluating the past season.

For the most part, the areas of criticism can be sorted into two buckets: personnel management and game management. We’ll start with the issue of personnel, which encompasses a few separate problems including the composition of the roster, the ordering of the depth chart and the usage of players’ respective skill sets.

On the first point, it’s been evident over the first three years of Riley’s stint at USC that the pursuit and accumulation of talent at different positions has not been conducted in a particularly well-balanced fashion. With regard to both the high school recruiting trail and the transfer portal, the Trojans have invested more into wide receiver, quarterback, and the secondary positions on defense than they have elsewhere on the roster. Additionally, the players prioritized for acquisition have frequently underwhelmed, speaking to some combination of difficulty with both player evaluation and in the pursuit of potentially stronger options. This manifested not only in significant deficiencies of depth and talent at those overlooked positions but also competitive logjams and suboptimal development at more overcrowded spots, most notably at the receiver position.

For Riley to have an imbalanced roster early on in his tenure was to be expected, but after three offseasons, the allocation of resources should have grown to become more balanced and efficient. When looking at the 2024 Trojans, this was evident in the oversaturation of receivers, a lack of quality depth along both lines of scrimmage and the linebacker positions, and a reliance on underwhelming veterans across the board.

This leads us to the next aspect of personnel management, which is the actual usage of players available on the roster. Over the course of Riley’s time at USC, it’s been nakedly clear that he prefers to play experienced veterans whenever possible. I can’t say whether this is a function of trust in their knowledge of the system, an adherence to promises made, or some combination of other factors, but what is evident is that USC’s determination to lean on a number of those veterans did not bear the fruit it should have and often stymied opportunities for younger players to develop. On defense, linebacker Mason Cobb’s poor play consistently hamstrung the defense over the course of two seasons, while other veteran transfers such as John Humphrey, Akili Arnold, Bryson Shaw and Easton Mascarenas-Arnold regularly underperformed despite being tasked with playing major snaps. Though the team’s young talent behind these players on the depth chart may have been raw and in need of further polish, one must wonder why it was worth allowing the veterans to continue playing poorly instead of giving youngsters the chance to develop.

This was most perplexing in the late season, once it was resoundingly clear that there were no real goals left within grasp. Knowing that most of these players would not be playing for the Trojans in 2025, it’s hard to understand why they would continue to take the lion’s share of snaps when so many young players on the roster required more opportunities. If the answer to this conundrum is that the coaches truly could not trust the younger players to eventually outperform the middling-at-best bar set by their elders, it speaks poorly to the accumulation of talent over the past three years and in the coaches' belief in their ability to develop it. Though I believe this thinking was relevant to an extent, the overarching insistence on reserving significant snaps for older players across the board leads me to think other factors were at play as well.

Perhaps Lynn deserves some of the blame for those choices on defense, but the fact that this issue has remained a theme throughout the course of Riley’s tenure on both sides of the ball speaks to the probability of his influence in this regard.

It so happened that this tendency affected the defense more than the offense this season, but the impulse also further complicated what was arguably already the most poorly managed positional rotation on the team. Amidst the bevy of talented receivers at the Trojans’ disposal, Ja’Kobi Lane and Makai Lemon turned out to be by far the most effective, but the duo was out-snapped and out-targeted by other pass-catchers for a majority of the season. Senior Kyron Hudson played the most snaps of any Trojans receiver on the season, despite being at best the third most effective receiving option on the team. Though he offered positive value as a run blocker and a talented set of hands, Hudson’s inability to generate reliable separation complicated Miller Moss’ ability to make quick decisions. Even more damning, however, was the staff’s insistence on force feeding Zachariah Branch despite the fact that he was by far the most inefficient of the team’s pass-catchers over the course of the year. Although he routinely struggled to run good routes, secure the football, and most surprisingly, to create after the catch, Branch received the most targets on the team (7 more than Lemon). He generated the worst passer rating of any receiver on the team when targeted (70.9), while Hudson drew the second worst at (77.7); compare that to Lane (122.8) and Lemon (110.4).

Despite evidence regarding the respective efficacy of the team’s receiving options early in the year, the pattern of snap and target distribution remained relatively steady until the closing phases of the season. This played a significant role in the lack of rhythm that consistently hamstrung the passing offense, as the ball continually was forced toward receivers who were unreliable with those targets. Given Riley’s insistence on passing the ball this year, it was of the utmost importance that the team’s pass catchers provided the most punch possible. The management of the rotation prevented this from happening, as the lack of playmaking from the receivers on the field frequently contributed to the squandering of passing downs and the subsequent shortening of otherwise promising drives. The failure of the passing game to move the chains reliably was the primary wrench in the engine of this offense, especially once the running game and offensive line got hot after the first few games.

Though the play-calling and quarterback play contributed to those issues, it’s frustrating to know that a key third factor, the receiving play, was so easily correctable. There were good reasons to believe even throughout the offseason that Lane and Lemon might be the two most exciting prospects in the Trojans' receiver room; after all, the duo convincingly outshone their positional competition during their spotlight opportunity in last year’s Holiday Bowl. Throughout the early phases of the 2024 season, both players showed real promise when given the opportunity but still continued to see fewer looks than their less-productive teammates. It’s a deeply frustrating thing for such a significant impediment to a team’s prospects to have been so easily remediable, and the fault once again returns to Riley’s strange decision-making when it comes to personnel.

Far too often, Riley has appeared to be stubbornly averse to altering depth charts and allocations of opportunity despite the accumulation of evidence calling for it on the film. It’s a tendency that’s hurt the Trojans for years now, keeping disappointing play on the field and stunting the development of talented young players. For what it’s worth, at the end of the year Riley finally acknowledged the fact that keeping a shorter receiver rotation would probably be in the team’s best interests. Though that’s certainly a good sign concerning his willingness to reevaluate, the bigger question about Riley’s ability to get the best players on the field for the program’s success in the short and long-term remains open.