Remember the good ole days back when we actually got to play new NCAA football video games? In Dynasty mode we got to play with schools like Wyoming or Western Kentucky and turn them into a National powerhouse. The game allowed you to alter your schedule so you could beat Alabama and jump up into the top 25 to put yourself in position for a BCS Bowl. The more that you won year after year, the more appealing your school became to recruits, which made your roster better, so on and so on, you get the idea ya?
Every school had pipeline states where if you recruited kids from X state you got a little bump in your recruiting pitches. If you were Central Michigan it was easier for you to recruit kids from Ohio than Oklahoma, for example. That was one of my favorite parts of the game because that’s what schools actually do in real life. North Carolina recruits almost exclusively between Virginia and Georgia, Oklahoma State hits Texas hard, and even more specifically the Dallas area. So much of being a college football coach is developing relationships with high school coaches to keep and develop pipelines from talent rich high schools.
No other program in the country has (had) a geographical pipeline like USC, they had Southern California on lockdown. Matt Leinart, Mark Sanchez, Matt Barkley, Cody Kessler, and Sam Darnold all played high school football in the Trojan’s backyard; and that’s just the quarterbacks. For basically the entire 21st century USC got to hand pick which California kids got to live out their dreams of suiting up at the Coliseum.
In 2018 when Mater Dei (Santa Ana, CA) five star quarterback JT Daniels signed with USC he became the obvious successor to Sam Darnold, and the next heralded Southern California-native to play for the Trojans. After a good-not great freshman year, Daniels tore his ACL in the season opener of his sophomore year. Daniel’s backup, Kedon Slovis, came in and lit up a ranked Stanford team to the tune of 377 yards with an 85% completion rate.
Slovis was never going to lose his job after throwing for over 3,500 yards as a true freshman. Daniels announced he was transferring that spring, then a month later he was off to Athens, Georgia. A few months later he led Georgia to a Peach Bowl win against undefeated Cincinnati.
Quarterbacks lose their job and transfer all the time, college football essentially has free agency now, which is fine. College football players transferring isn’t the problem with college football, and JT Daniels transferring after he lost his job isn’t the problem with USC. The problem with USC is that Daniels represents more of an unfortunate pattern than a one off transfer.
Southern California natives are starting this season for Alabama, Clemson, Georgia, Ohio State, Miami, and Ole Miss at quarterback, and for lots of other programs around the country. Daniels was actually on USC’s roster, to be fair. Bryce Young (Alabama), Jake Garcia (Miami), and Matt Corral (Ole Miss) were committed to USC, before eventually flipping their commitments. USC wasn’t seriously involved in the recruitment of DJ Uiagalelei (Clemson), or Jayden Daniels (Arizona State).
USC isn’t going to get every guy, California is one of the most talent rich states in the country and programs generally are only going to take one quarterback per year. They don’t even only have to recruit guys from the Los Angeles area; Kedon Slovis wasn’t highly recruited in high school in Arizona, but has played his way into becoming a likely first round pick in the 2022 NFL Draft. USC also has two incoming quarterbacks both from Utah powerhouse Corner Canyon.
The Trojans are always going to get good recruits and good quarterbacks just because they’re USC, they have one of the highest recruiting floors in the country. Almost half the conference can compete with USC if they’re recruiting at their floor, though, and the Trojans only have one conference championship in the last ten plus years to prove it.
Bryce Young was the number one quarterback in the country when he came out of Mater Dei. The same high school as JT Daniels, and Matt Barkley, AND Matt Leinart. Young to USC was as big of a no brainer as there’s been in recruiting: The number one quarterback in the country, who committed to USC as a junior, playing for probably the biggest pipeline high school that USC has. Next thing you know he’s playing in Tuscaloosa for Nick Saban and USC’s already weak grip on Southern California recruiting got even looser.
Meanwhile, down the road from Mater Dei at one of their biggest rivals, St. John Bosco, DJ Uiagalelei was in the midst of a busy recruitment process himself. The five star prospects' final list of schools included LSU, Alabama, Oregon, Georgia, and Clemson where he ultimately signed and will start this year. USC wasn’t on his final list, but it sounds like that could have been a problem easily solved by the Trojans:
“They just didn’t really recruit me how a lot of other schools was,” he said. “I just ended up not going there and choosing a different school.” - DJ Uiagalelei
Read that again in case you missed it: THEY JUST DIDN’T REALLY RECRUIT ME… If I were a USC fan, hearing that would make me want to drive to Manhattan Beach and walk right into the ocean.
More than any other position, quarterback recruiting is really just one big domino effect. USC choose to go after Bryce Young as opposed to DJ Uiagalelei. Bryce Young committed in July of 2018 (the summer before his junior year). Most schools only take one quarterback recruit per cycle, so since USC had already secured a commitment from the top QB in the country they didn’t really recruit DJ as well.
That’s totally fine, I legit understand the process. However, USC had zero contingency plan for a Bryce Young fallout. In February of 2019 Alabama quarterback commit Carson Beck decommitted, leaving Nick Saban without a quarterback for the 2020 class. Alabama got Bryce Young to come on an official visit in September of 2019 (Bryce’s senior year) and two (2!!!) days later he flipped his commitment from USC to Alabama.
By the time that happened USC didn’t have time to recruit another top quarterback for the 2020 class. DJ had committed to Clemson months ago, and because schools often only take one quarterback they often commit earlier than other positions simply because the spots fill up. Unfortunately for USC, by the time Young flipped to Bama there weren’t any quarterbacks left to recruit. That 2020 class ended up being the 64th ranked recruiting class in the country, worse than: Rutgers, Kansas, Washington State, Oregon State, Vanderbilt, and about sixty other teams in the country.
That just cannot be allowed to happen at USC. Since 2009 USC has won one PAC 12 Championship. A track school that’s two hours away from the biggest airport in Oregon has six titles in that same time span. Isolated incidents, like Bryce Young flipping, aren’t the end of the world for any program. However, USC is at the point where these issues have stopped becoming isolated incidents and have turned into a problematic pattern that they haven’t shown they can correct.
USC should be dominating their conference more than any other team in the entire country. Their inability to live up to the program's potential has allowed programs like Oregon, Stanford, and Washington to dominate the conference over the last ten plus years. USC’s lack of dominance has also allowed national programs across the country to be able to go into Southern California and recruit kids that before would not want to play anywhere but in the Coliseum.
USC isn’t Nebraska or Miami, has been programs that will never be what they used to. Everything in still in place for the Trojans to rule the PAC 12 and compete for national championships every year. To get back to where they were though they CANNOT continue to miss on California quarterbacks, and they have to become THE school that kids from Los Angeles want to play at.
Until they can do that again, they’ll continue to be rulers of nothing, a king without a kingdom.
-By Jake Cowden
Photo: Harry How / Getty Images