Inside Cooper Lovelace's journey from 1 year of HS football to JUCO to USC

Perspective is not lost on new USC offensive line addition Cooper Lovelace.

He didn't play high school football until his senior year at Shawnee Mission East HS in eastern Kansas. He redshirted his first year at Butler Community College in El Dorado, Kan., had his second fall season wiped out by COVID, got a few games in the spring and one full season this past fall.

Now he's a USC Trojan.

"Opportunities like that just don't come," Lovelace says over the phone Thursday night, after announcing his USC commitment. "I played one year of high school football. If you had told me [then] I'd be going to USC to play for Lincoln Riley, I probably would have smacked you. ... It's hard to explain, I spent three years of just absolutely hard nitty gritty work that I've been doing, and coming from where I was, God, it just feels so surreal."

The day before head coach Lincoln Riley told him he had a USC offer, Lovelace was among volunteers helping to clean up debris from a tornado that ripped through not far from his home. A week later he was sitting on top of the Coliseum having dinner on an official recruiting visit with the Trojans.

"It's crazy," he says. "I realized a couple days ago I was in nowhere in Kansas cleaning up a tornado wreck and now I'm on top of the Coliseum in L.A. It was just one of those surreal moments."

It's a great story through and through, is what it is.

Lovelace, listed at 6-foot-5, 320 pounds, was one of the most coveted JUCO offensive linemen in the 2022 class, ultimately choosing USC over Florida and Oklahoma State. He says he had late SEC offers come in, but he was ready to shut his recruitment down at that point.

For that matter, USC came in "late late," as he puts it, but things progressed quickly.

Lovelace heard from offensive coordinator/OL coach Josh Henson on a Friday in late April. Interestingly, of all the schools that had some out to watch the lineman go through spring practice at Butler CC, USC wasn't among them to his knowledge. But USC tight ends coach Zach Hanson knew Butler CC coach Brice Vignery from an old Kansas State connection, so Lovelace figures they had done their homework on him.

But just to be sure he sent Henson -- who was getting on a flight back home from Miami after that initial phone conversation -- video of a workout he had done for one of the SEC teams talking to him and about 20 clips from the fall season and spring, showing himself in pass pro, handling double teams, running outside zone, etc.

"Just a little bit of everything so he could kind of get the bases covered. So he had enough to make a correct analysis," Lovelace says.

The Trojans certainly made a quick analysis.

The two sides reconvened the next day and Lovelace got on the phone with Riley.

"He offered me 90 seconds into the call and we talked for about 20 more minutes after that and I can't tell a word the man said [after that]," Lovelace says of his excitement.

Lovelace advertises on his Twitter profile that he's "the most flexible big man you have ever seen."

He started having college coaches ask him what he meant by that, so he filmed a video showing him lifting his leg over his head, doing a full split and other flexibility feats.

"And then boom, here we are, 85 million views later," he jokes.

Well, 915,000 and counting, which is quite impressive as is.

That comes from his background doing gymnastics when he was younger. Later on, his focus was wrestling. He had played football in the fifth and sixth grade, but that doesn't count, he says.

His real debut in the sport came as a high school senior. There was a new coach at his high school and the timing felt right for him to go out for the team. He took to it immediately -- and aggressively -- wanting to perfect his new craft as quickly as possible.

Lovelace knew he had real potential at the position, but that was a harder sell to colleges after only one season of football.

"It's kind of tough to start your recruiting December of your senior year of high school. ... It didn't leave too many options on the table," he says.

He had an offer to walk-on at Missouri. Instead, he chose the JUCO route. And to be honest, he says he actually benefited greatly from the disruption COVID caused to college football. It gave him two full years to develop and make up for lost time without using any eligibility for those first two years (including the redshirt season).

"I think the O-line coach here is elite. In four years now, he's sent out 25 Division I offensive linemen. He just pumps us out like nobody's business and he prepares us like nothing else," Lovelace says. "For me to talk on the whiteboard to a Div. I FBS head coach and OC and hold my own water for 90 minutes to two hours tells you a lot about him."

More on that in a moment ...

Even after a strong fall season at Butler, Lovelace's recruitment was slow to take off.

In early February, he received offers from Rice, Tulsa and UMass. The next month Kent State and Central Michigan came in. Kansas was hovering throughout.

Then recruiters started coming out in numbers to Butler CC as their respective spring practices ended and the JUCO was still going, creating a prime evaluation window.

"Teams started rolling out to practice. I had 15 Division I teams at practice filming me ... Everyone's got their phones or iPads out recording reps. It started to pick up. Iowa state pulls the trigger on me and the crazy thing is with USC, they got in the game late late," Lovelace says.

But not too late.

A week after that initial contact with the Trojans he was on campus at USC, with no time to waste. He wanted to maximize every moment of his official visit, and that had nothing to do with seeing the sights of L.A.

"Me and Henson are out there working on O-line technique work in the lobby of where we're getting breakfast at, just because O-line questions come up and I don't have that much time with him, so we started cancelling any activities or anything planned because I needed more time for football, more time with that staff. So we're at breakfast, we're at dinner on top of the Coliseum doing O-line work," Lovelace says, recounting the start of that weekend.

"I wanted to talk football. My goal was to leave the football room as confused as possible. I knew as much as I know, if I can leave that room so confused that means I will be able to learn so much more. So I told him 'Confuse me as much as possible, make me lost, make me don't understand it. Give me it as advanced as you can.' So we were going at it for probably 2, 2.5, maybe 3 hours all the way up until dinner. ... It was just great, we're going back and forth, I'm drawing on the board, we're pulling up clips, we're just going at it. It felt like it was 30 minutes but it was 3 hours, so that's normally a good sign."

The next day was more of the same, Lovelace says, but there was a dinner for the visiting recruits -- Wyoming DE transfer Solomon Byrd would also commit from that weekend -- over at Riley's palatial estate in Palos Verdes.

While Lovelace had mostly football on his mind that weekend, he couldn't help but notice something else while over at the head coach's house.

"All the coaches were there, right, but all their families were there. Their wives were there, all their kids were playing in their yard together, my family was talking to coaches, and I'm sitting down on his back patio just looking at the sunset and the beach, seeing my family talk to the coaches, seeing all their kids playing around. I end up playing with them on the swing and playing monkey in the middle for an hour and a half, so I think I'm going to get hooked into some babysitting gigs in the future,” he jokes. “But I'm sitting on the patio and I'm thinking, 'What else am I searching for?' They checked every box I need, they're meeting everything I'm looking for."

Before leaving Los Angeles, Riley asked Lovelace if he had any final questions.

"I was like, 'Nope. You never make a decision when you're in LaLa Land so I'm going to take Dorothy and we're going to head on back to Kansas and I'm going to sleep on it.' He chuckled, I think he thought that was funny," Lovelace says.

What Lovelace didn't want to do was make any sort of final decision until he knew he had been accepted into USC. Again, the Trojans don't take many junior college transfers -- Lovelace is the first since defensive end Nick Figueroa in the 2019 class -- in part because it can be hard to clear the admissions hurdles into the university.

But Riley called Lovelace last Tuesday and let him know he was in.

"Once I found out I was accepted, Lincoln was like, 'We got you in, you're admitted to USC.' I was like, 'You boys got yourself a Trojan,'" Lovelace recalls.

What opportunity exactly is Lovelace walking into?

He said he thinks he might start off working at tackle, but he knows if he has any shot to make the NFL it will be as a guard. Henson, meanwhile, also wants to see him take some reps at center.

USC had a clear top six among its offensive linemen coming out of spring with tackles Bobby Haskins, Courtland Ford and Jonah Monheim, guards Andrew Vorhees, Justin Dedich, Monheim can fit there too, and center Brett Neilon.

The rest is still a work in progress and adding another option to the mix can only help.

With three years of eligibility left, Lovelace's greatest value may well be in 2023 and beyond when Vorhees, Haskins, Neilon and potentially Dedich are gone.

"That is going to be so beneficial to me to bounce around and see what they like the most. That's another beneficial thing about this whole scenario, I don't have to get baptized by fire right away," Lovelace says. "Obviously, you don't bring a junior college guy into sit. You bring him in to bring competition to the room. ... I have a guaranteed opportunity to compete, and the thing is if I don't win the job right now, OK, well now I'm just going to be working under great guys and trying to beat them out every day. ...

"I can't lose either way. I'm going to go in there and try to take someone's job because that's just the way football is and the way I'm wired, but you can't control when you get on the field and you damn well can't control when you get off."

Lovelace and USC just seem like an ideal fit all around.

He said he still had late interest coming in from SEC schools, and Florida wanted him to visit, but he had found all he was looking for -- and the Trojans hope they have as well in addressing a major roster need.

"Sure, there's SEC football, right. But then again, Lincoln Riley is elite, Josh Henson is elite. That kind of development they've got in that strength room, elite. So there's more than just SEC football or else I would have hopped on the first SEC offer," Lovelace says. "There's SEC offers I didn't even post because they were so late to the game that it just wouldn't have been respectful to that staff. I don't do social media -- I do football."

And again, he has no time to waste. Just days after announcing his USC commitment, he was planning to hit the road for the two-day drive to campus this weekend to officially move in and get started on turning the "surreal" into reality.

Meanwhile, he has a message for USC fans as well ...

"I can tell you, they're going to get an absolutely smash mouth nasty Kansas football player who wants nothing more than to help this team win. That's the best way to summarize," he says. "God, I am just so fired up. It's just an incredible opportunity."