It was a Monday sometime last fall, and for the USC football players who weren't playing prominent roles on Saturdays at that point, it was their chance to compete with each other.

No fans, no television cameras, no spotlight, but that didn't stop wide receiver Ja'Kobi Lane from putting on a show nonetheless.

"He scored a touchdown, he caught a ball one-handed and then just did a headstand -- not a handstand, not on his hands. He did a headstand, just went up on his head and just like a plank stood on his head," fellow wide receiver Duce Robinson shared this week, smiling at the story. "I don't know how he did it. I would probably break my neck if I tried to do it. But he managed to do it. That's just Ja'Kobi for you."

Hang around the USC football program even a little bit, and one will quickly get the sense there are a lot of "That's just Ja'Kobi" stories to be told.

Just last week, as the marching band had been invited on the practice field and continued playing as it exited across the street and down the sidewalk, there was Lane borrowing a pair of cymbals and clanging them together as he walked with the band members.

Quarterback Miller Moss was asked how often Lane amuses his teammates doing something like that.

"Every day," Moss said while laughing. "He's very unique, but he knows when to be serious, he knows when to lock in, which is obviously important. You can't be that guy 24-7."

It's indeed that time.

It was just last fall, but Lane is already far removed from the days of saving his highlights for Monday competitions on the practice field. The sophomore heads into No. 23-ranked USC's highly-anticipated season-opener with No. 13 LSU on Sunday as one of the most exciting players on the roster after flashing his potential with two touchdowns in a breakout Holiday Bowl performance in December.

The uber athletic 6-foot-4 receiver is part of a youth movement at the position for the Trojans as one of four sophomores expected to lead the aerial attack, along with Robinson, Zachariah Branch and Makai Lemon, and many feel Lane could be the most impactful of the bunch this season.

As affable as Lane can be, however, he won't feed into his own hype.

"As much as hearing good stuff about yourself is nice, it's always reality first and we all realize it's a team effort, team sport," he said. "And this year we've kind of all joined in as one to go out and have this big goal. So I think above me, it's about the team."

That's the other side of Lane, the serious side that Moss mentioned -- the part of him that has grown so much over the last couple of years in so many ways, according to those who know him best.

"Really proud of the strides he's made as a player and a person," Moss said. "He came from a high school where he was far and away the best player, and I think he started to learn and understand what it means to be part of a team. If a play is not necessarily designed to go to him then it's not the end of the world, and that he's obviously an important piece but a piece of a much larger puzzle, and I think he's realized that and has learned how to put the team first and I'm really proud of him for doing that."

Said coach Lincoln Riley: "The thing I respect about Ja'Kobi is he’s always open to coaching. He’s open to when we sit down and talk about these things, you see him make a conscious effort to work on them. And he’s done that ever since high school. There was a lot of trust in just getting him here coming out of high school. There were a lot of things where he had to grow and continue to progress, and he’s lived up to his word every step of the way."

As Riley noted, Lane's growth and maturation process really started a year before he got to USC -- it had to if he was going to make it there in the first place.

At the time of his recruitment, Lane was overshadowed a bit by the other three receivers USC would sign in that 2023 recruiting class.

Branch and Robinson were nationally-coveted five-star prospects and Lemon was right there with them as a four-star top-100 recruit.

Rivals rated Lane a three-star recruit, meanwhile, and it wasn't purely a talent evaluation. Same as why some big-time college programs backed off in his recruitment, his high school coach said, leaving Arizona State as the other top contender in the end (though Lane did say Texas and Oregon were among those recruiting him hard).

"You heard different things. [A lot of schools] didn't go through me, I'll tell you that much. Again, I heard a lot. There were some schools just from an academic standpoint that couldn't really touch him," said Kyle Enders, Lane's head football coach at Red Mountain High School in Mesa, Arizona.