Of the 13 transfers USC took in this offseason, one stood out from the rest.

Defensive lineman Tyrone Taleni was neither a former top recruit nor a proven college football player like the rest, as he played just 97 total defensive snaps over the last two seasons at Kansas State while notching 5 tackles and 2 sacks.

So how did the USC coaching staff identify him as a preferred target out of the transfer portal?

It speaks to just how well coaches know the rosters of their conference opponents, as Lincoln Riley, Alex Grinch and Co., had gone against Kansas State each of the last two seasons in the Big 12 while at Oklahoma, and in game-planning for the Wildcats they had taken a mental note of the raw defensive lineman from Western Samoa.

"We’d seen him in the league there. It was a deal where you look at it, you look at the total number of snaps, wasn’t a lot there. Then when you started to research him, the worker, his journey in football, it kind of made sense," Riley said. "The snaps he did play, we saw some things that we thought were intriguing, especially with our style on the defensive line. Our style is a little different than K-State’s.

"We got around the kid, learned about some of the circumstances there. There’s always a lot to the story. With these transfers, you have to kind of weed through recruiting quickly. The more we found out about him, we were confident in the kind of kid we were bringing in here. We were confident that the scheme would fit the kind of player that he is and that we think he can become."