For all the offseason additions USC made to its roster, one that perhaps didn't get the attention it deserved was bringing in kicker Michael Lantz as a transfer from Georgia Southern.

Lantz was 23 of 28 on field goals last season, 45 of 45 on extra point attempts and delivered 43 touchbacks on 61 kickoffs (with 2 out of bounds) for the Eagles.

Simply put, he was one of the steadiest kickers in college football, ranking 10th nationally with his 82.1 percent conversion rate among those with at least 25 field goal attempts.

Even more simply put, he was exactly what USC was missing.

“Yeah, just, we didn’t perform well enough. I mean, just simple as that," coach Lincoln Riley said Friday. "We missed some kicks that we need to make, we were not good in the kickoff department. I mean, honestly, our 10 guys on the kickoff team last year did a hell of a job, considering how few of touchbacks we had. And so, yeah, neither one was good enough to play at the level that we expect to play. And so we brought in some competition. We’re looking at a lot of guys right now."

The incumbent starter Denis Lynch was 10 of 14 on field goals and 65 of 66 on extra point attempts for the Trojans, and as Riley noted he produced just 13 touchbacks in 60 kickoffs while also sending three kicks out of bounds.

Punter Eddie Czaplicki also handled 30 kickoffs with 14 touchbacks (and one out of bounds), and Tyler Robles had 3 kickoff attempts with 0 touchbacks.

Collectively, USC ranked tied for 82nd with 27 touchbacks and 100th nationally in allowing opponents to average 22.02 yards per kickoff return while only nine teams in the country had more kickoff returns attempted against them.

A feel-good story as a former walk-on eventually put on scholarship, Lynch says he welcomes the added competition.

"That's fine. You don't come to USC to like walk on a cloud, like 'Oh, everything's perfect.' You [come] to compete and get better," Lynch said. "That's what everyone in the specialists room is pushing you to do, so I think that's really good."

Lynch's biggest struggle -- aside from kickoffs -- the last two seasons has been consistency. He was 8 of 10 on field goals of 40-plus yards in 2022 but just 4 of 9 on attempts from 30-39 yards and continued with those unusual splits last fall, going 3 for 3 on FGs over 40 yards while all four of his misses came inside 40 yards.

"It had its ups and downs," he said, assessing his performance. "There were games you felt really good, I kicked real well, and there's games you'd like to have a kick back or you'd like to have done something differently. Yeah, I'm looking forward to this season.

"I think the mental aspect of things might need to sharpen up. That's something me and coaches have worked on a lot is like, focusing on each kick and making each kick the same. Because when I kicked my good ball, I thought it was really good, and then sometimes maybe something would happen and it wouldn't be as good. So trying to figure out what exactly it was that caused that."

If Lynch is going to get another shot this fall, he'll have to earn it all over again.

Lantz, meanwhile, could have stayed at Georgia Southern, where he'd already established himself as the starter, but he instead entered the transfer portal and knew fairly quickly where he wanted to go.

Lantz noted that after hearing from USC analyst Ryan Dougherty, who works with the special teams unit, that he didn't need to hear much more. He set a "do not contact" status within the transfer portal and honed in on the Trojans.

"I think, honestly, it's almost intuitive -- it's USC. There's not really many other places like this, so it was a very easy decision for my wife and I to move out here," Lantz said.

"We knew I had a pretty strong year the past season, so we kind of just took a step of faith and entered the portal. We had no idea where we'd end up. The chance to come to USC was honestly a chance of a lifetime."

Lantz's breakthrough last year was a long time coming for the kicker, who started his college career at Minnesota in 2019 (going 8 of 11 on field goals) before redshirting the next season and missing 2021 due to injury. He transferred back to his home state in landing at Georgia Southern, serving as the Eagles' kickoff specialist in 2022 (while going 0 for 2 on field goals, both of 50-plus yards) before his big 2023 season.

Now, he's betting on himself in a way -- a decision he made with his wife Elise, whom he married back in January.

"It's an opportunity to compete for a job," Lantz said. "... If it's God's will for me to play here that would be great. But if it's not, then it's a unique opportunity, my wife and I got to come out to LA and compete for a job."

That is the key word.

“We started it wide-open, but it’s one of those, like, you only get so many live kicks. And so, it is wide open, but we have to make decisions quickly and we got to narrow it, which, we’re getting pretty close to that point where we want to narrow it down," Riley said of that competition.

Robles, Garth White and Ryon Sayeri are also part of that competition.

"We’re doing more field-goal snaps, we found some new ways to be efficient, we’re doing more of those in practice than we’ve ever done in our career because we’ve got several guys that we want to get a good look at early on here in camp, and then we’re going to start narrowing that down here pretty quick," Riley said. "But, yeah, I mean, the new guys that we got in, obviously Lantz, Ryon, a couple of those guys are kicking really well. Some of the guys that are returning – Denis, Tyler, Garth and those guys have really, really improved.

"I mean, our numbers as far as the first part of camp, I get it’s practice, but were as good as Coach Dougherty and I have ever had in all the years and the places that we’ve been in terms of percentage. So, it’s raised the competition in that room, and we’ll have some tough decisions to make."

While fans were especially critical of USC's special teams performance last season -- outside of those electrifying Zachariah Branch kickoff and punt returns, of course -- Riley felt the areas of struggle overshadowed some other positives.

With the hope being that if USC can get the kind of production Lantz delivered for Georgia Southern last year -- be it from Lantz himself or Lynch, etc. -- that it would be the missing piece to the unit overall.

"That was obviously done knowing that part in particular we have to be better at," Riley said of bringing in more competition at kicker. "Because we did so many good things on special teams last year. I mean, our punt return, our punt team last year were good enough to be a national-championship team. I mean, they’re national-championship-like numbers. But we know we’ve got to be a better kickoff return, and then our whole kickoff, field goals, all that piece of it have been a big focus for us.”