NCAAF
LOS ANGELES — Three months from tomorrow, USC will walk onto the field at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas and kick off its 2024 season against LSU in a highly anticipated matchup with significant stakes for both programs.
It’s the Trojans’ most high-profile non-Notre Dame nonconference game since a home-and-home series with Texas in 2017 and 2018. It’s certainly exciting for Trojans fans who have witnessed few matchups like this since the Pete Carroll days when the program often played marquee opponents from outside its region.
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It also might be a detriment to USC, which faces a brutal schedule that also includes a potential top-10 Notre Dame team, defending national champion Michigan as well as Penn State, which has finished in the top 15 the past two seasons.
There’s been a lot of noise about USC’s scheduling desires this week, including reports and speculation about whether it wanted to actually play the LSU game. Some believe the Trojans shouldn’t continue the Notre Dame series moving forward.
That’s good offseason fodder, but the simple reality is USC has to thoroughly evaluate how it wants to handle nonconference scheduling moving forward.
The Trojans find themselves in a tough spot. Nonconference games against teams like LSU drum up plenty of excitement for the fans and create great discussions over a long offseason. But the goal is to win a national championship and playing games like that when Notre Dame, which has been a top-15 program for the past decade, is already on the schedule only makes the path toward a potential College Football Playoff berth more difficult.
There’s some early evidence that USC’s current leadership, led by athletic director Jen Cohen, is already taking this into consideration. The program scheduled a home-and-home series with Ole Miss in the spring of 2020 — three-plus years before Cohen’s arrival — for the 2025 and 2026 seasons. USC and Ole Miss’ respective conference schedules have been dramatically altered since then — the Trojans have moved to the Big Ten while the Rebels’ league, the SEC, now includes Texas and Oklahoma. No official announcement has been made, but the series seems dead in the water.
“There are some matchups we have on the books that may not be around in the future. We may have some announcements coming shortly.”
Keith Carter didn’t clarify which games, but the lingering scuttlebutt is that the USC home and home is mutually kaput.https://t.co/c6w8zYCdnP
— Chase Parham (@ChaseParham) March 27, 2024
The incentive for playing such games is low these days. USC was still in the Pac-12 when it scheduled the LSU game and the Ole Miss series. Because the league faced perception issues, the Trojans needed to schedule those sorts of games. Now that USC is in the Big Ten, if it goes 9-3 or 10-2 in a given season, it’ll likely receive the benefit of the doubt and earn a Playoff bid. But what about 8-4? That likely won’t be good enough.
One alternative is scheduling tough nonconference games and examining the Notre Dame series — a hypothetical Fox Sports’ Colin Cowherd brought up this week.
“I’m going to ask a question. Why does USC have to keep playing Notre Dame? College football punted on history last year.” — @ColinCowherd pic.twitter.com/PojBgM9ZOY
— Herd w/Colin Cowherd (@TheHerd) May 29, 2024
In theory, USC could play Notre Dame twice every four years, but that’s easier said than done. While the Trojans have bucked tradition recently — leaving the Pac-12 after a century in the conference — discontinuing that series would be one hell of a mess to navigate politically for any administration.
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The two programs first played in 1926 and have taken breaks only for World War II and the COVID-19 pandemic.
As of now, the Trojans are under contract to play the Fighting Irish for only two more years, through 2026. But there is no indication that USC is interested in altering how often the rivalry is played, per program sources.
So it would be a surprise to see something happen with that series. It’s much easier to envision a different USC tradition coming to an end.
The Trojans are the last FBS program to never have played an FCS school. UCLA and Notre Dame, USC’s chief rivals, were part of that club, but the Bruins played Alabama State in 2022 while the Fighting Irish played Tennessee State in 2023.
Never playing an FCS program is a point of pride for a vocal segment of USC’s fan base. In 2019, the Trojans’ decision to schedule UC Davis for the 2021 season was met with some outcry — enough that then-athletic director Mike Bohn’s first move was to cancel that series and replace UC Davis with San Jose State.
That was at a different time for the program and the athletic department. Fans were extremely upset Clay Helton was still the head coach, and Bohn was a surprise hire who needed some political victories early in his tenure.
Current coach Lincoln Riley has much more support from the fan base — though another disappointing season could start testing that a bit — and Cohen’s hire was viewed much more positively than Bohn’s. So scheduling an FCS school may be easier to pull off now.
Just take a look at Riley and Cohen’s backgrounds as well. At Oklahoma, Riley played FCS programs later in his tenure, in 2019 and 2021, when he theoretically would’ve had more influence on the schedule. When Cohen was the athletic director at Washington, the Huskies followed a fairly straightforward scheduling model for nonconference games — one Power 5 program, one Group of 5 program and one FCS school.
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Notre Dame essentially serves as the power-conference program on USC’s schedule, and the Trojans already have a Group of 5 oppponent scheduled for 2025 (Georgia Southern) 2026 (Fresno State), 2027 (UNLV and Nevada) and 2028 (Fresno State). It wouldn’t be a shock if USC scheduled FCS programs to fill the gaps on the schedule and to make things a bit easier now that the program will be playing a more challenging conference slate.
Some fans would be upset, but everyone plays FCS programs. There isn’t a banner hanging in the Coliseum to commemorate the fact that the Trojans have never played an FCS school. It doesn’t go in the NCAA record books either.
USC’s stated goal is to win national championships. There’s a lot the program has to do in order to get there. Riley has to figure out the defensive side of the equation. The coaching staff needs to recruit better. The NIL setup has to continue to evolve and take positive steps forward. The program has to finish its facility upgrades.
Finding a sensible path forward with the schedule is another important part of the process.
(Photo of Zachariah Branch: Matt Cashore / USA Today)
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Antonio Morales covers USC football for The Athletic. Previously, he spent three years at the Clarion Ledger in Mississippi, where he covered Ole Miss for two seasons and Jackson State for another. He also spent two years covering preps for the Orange County Register and Torrance Daily Breeze. Follow Antonio on Twitter @AntonioCMorales
