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Paolo Uggetti, ESPN
LOS ANGELES, CA — It doesn’t take much to see that things are different at USC this year.
Yes, Lincoln Riley is still the head coach — his third season, in fact — and the Trojans do return a number of players from last season and several other coaches too. The goal, the message, the approach — nobody will tell you any of those have changed. But it’s also clear that things are very different indeed.
Walk onto the practice field and you’ll immediately see the glossy, green new turf field USC has built being shown off and utilized. The practice area is now twice as large. Look around and you’ll see banners announcing what’s coming: an entirely new football facility, expected to cost, $200 million, coming in 2026.
Take a closer look out onto the aforementioned field and you’ll see plenty of changes too. D’Anton Lynn has gone from wearing UCLA Bruins blue and gold to hopscotching his way down the 405 freeway to try and take USC’s defense into the future. Anyone who watched a game of the Trojans last year knows they need it.
Lynn’s deluge of a move brought along others in the same current, not just coaches from around the country with breadth and depth of experience in college and the NFL, but also much-needed talented defenders from UCLA, Oregon State and Texas A&M to try and improve both in the present and the future.
“I do think that we’re fortunate enough to be at a place that you can have a shot at anybody,” Riley said when he hired Lynn. “We just decided that we’re not going to worry about a current job that these guys have. We’re going to go after the best.”
And yet perhaps the biggest change, the weightiest and most consequential, can be found under center. Caleb Williams is gone. Enter Miller Moss. The junior, who backed up Williams the past two seasons, is both a fresh face and a familiar one. It is as close to continuity as USC could have gotten short of convincing Williams to forego the NFL one more season.
Zoom in just a bit more and you can also see what many players and coaches have been talking about for much of the offseason. The Trojans are bigger — 1,400 collective pounds bigger, according to Riley — and have put an emphasis on reshaping their roster. Literally.
“When we got here, just with the scheme change going into the new conference, we knew that we had to get bigger,” Lynn said. “We knew we had to get stronger.”
USC’s 2024 season will not fully be determined by what life after Williams may look like. It won’t come down to how much weight or strength they’ve gained, or be expected to be overhauled by a single coaching hire.
Without a Heisman Trophy winner and No. 1 overall pick on its roster, USC is banking on what it has been able to build and evolve over the past three years under Riley to turn what could be a down year for the Trojans into one where they could be in a position to surprise.
“I feel a bright energy around the team this year,” wide receiver Zachariah Branch said. “I definitely feel like everybody’s fully invested into the team and I feel like that’s just going to help us excel.”
AT SOME POINT, Elijah Paige and Mason Murphy stopped counting calories. The mandate this offseason from the coaching staff and Rachel Suba, USC’s director of sports nutrition, was that USC linemen would eat about 5,000 to 6,000 calories a day, but once you get to a certain routine with the amount of food, the calories count is second nature.
“I got to the point where I was more just eating a lot of big meals,” Murphy said. “Four big meals a day, so that definitely gave me some gains.”
“I was just eating whatever they put in front of me,” Paige said. “Whatever I could eat to gain weight.”
Behind the 1,400-pound total that Riley touted are Suba and Bennie Wylie, USC’s director of sports performance, who were the architects of the offseason fitness plan that players committed to.
Suba and Wylie created a cohesive offseason plan for players and each position group that catered to their needs — be it gaining weight, losing it or simply maintaining. From the meals to the workouts, the goal was to get stronger in preparation for a season that would be different in more ways than one.
“They have physically prepared us and that has just mentally prepared us to be ready for this season,” safety Christian Pierce said. “I feel like now our strength is in our conditioning.”
The total weight added may be the headline, but USC’s players have been individually sharing before and after photos of their progress, and more specifically, the weight gained and body fat lost in the process. The added strength, the way the whole team has embraced the process of getting bigger and faster, seems to have emboldened USC’s roster as it enters a new fray it knows will ask far more than previous seasons have.
“I think last year the emphasis and the importance of getting bigger and stronger was shown,” cornerback Bryson Shaw said. His own offseason calorie count hovered around 4,500. “We knew we needed to improve in that area and Coach Wiley and his staff challenged us to respond to the criticism. And I think we really responded well. Going into this season, I think we’re much way more ahead than where we were going into last season.”
What looms larger is the unforeseen nature of playing in an entirely new conference, where different styles and different opponents await. Like Lynn, some coaches and players view the added emphasis on strength as a necessary point of transitioning into the Big Ten.
“We want to have a physical presence. We want to talk about being one of the most physical or if not the most physical team in the country,” linebackers coach Matt Entz said. Last year, USC missed a total of 141 tackles. “It’s a game of blocking and tackling. Not to oversimplify the game, but sometimes as coaches it’s easy to do that. We need to be fundamentally better than our opponents and that’s where we’re at right now. We got to continue to every day go out there with that mentality.”
THE ELEPHANT IN the room all of last season — and really, the past two years — was USC’s defense. At its best, it was bending but not breaking enough to allow them to stay in games. At its worst, it was actively working against an offense that, at times, was one of the best in the country.
Riley relented and fired defensive coordinator Alex Grinch with two games left in the regular season. Then, as many people expected that USC would look far and wide for a replacement — perhaps into Big Ten country even — Riley simply reached across town and hired the coach that turned UCLA’s defense into one of the best in the country.
With Lynn came not just the subsequent hires of secondary coach Doug Belk from Houston, North Dakota State head coach Entz to coach linebackers and former NFL assistant Eric Henderson to coach the defensive line.
“It’s revamped the energy in the building, something that we needed,” Shaw said of the new staff.
While several returning members of USC’s defense — and those who are new as well — are avoiding comparing and contrasting what this year’s defense already feels like to last, some are not hesitating in doing just that.
“The culture last year wasn’t something that everyone was upholding and agreed to uphold. It had to do with a lot of the leaders just letting stuff slide, not thinking everything mattered,” linebacker Mason Cobb said. “So for this year, I think a lot of guys have been here, a lot of transfers have understood what we’re trying to do here and hopped on board and everyone’s on board.”
“I would say it’s night and day when it comes to this year and last year,” quarterback Moss said of the defense. “I think going against obviously guys like Kamari [Ramsey], Easton [Mascarenas-Arnold] who came in, Mason Cobb, along with a lot of really special players in the secondary makes it difficult for me as a quarterback. But it also makes me better.”
Without divulging strategy, USC defenders and other coaches have described Lynn’s system as “simplified,” “versatile,” “aggressive,” “fun to learn” and one that allows them to feel “freed up” and “play to their strengths.”
“I think it is a pro scheme, multiple fronts, multiple coverages, a lot of things that could potentially confuse our opponent,” Belk said. “But most of all it’s player friendly and we want to be able to play fast and play physical and play smart football and be consistent in whatever we do.”
At the center of it is Lynn, who appears to have rapidly impressed everyone in the building with how quickly he’s not just found his groove with a new staff and roster, but how he is managing trying to bring players up to speed while attempting to get the unit as a whole to feel and play in a cohesive fashion.
“The toughest thing in college is just the timeframe that you have,” Lynn said. “You don’t have a ton of time to meet, so you have to be very efficient with how you install. You don’t have a ton of time on the field. You have to be very efficient with how you do your walkthroughs.”
With a limited amount of time and what amounts to a new language that Lynn has to teach and implement within his staff and throughout the unit, USC’s defense has gone through a fast tracked education between spring practice and fall camp. Lynn, for his part, has tried his best to keep things simple enough to be digestible but not diluted to the point where they are not effective.
“[Lynn] does an outstanding job of compartmentalizing what we’re doing from a teaching standpoint,” Entz said. “If we can teach the game in terms of concepts and rules and principles, then you should be able to have some volume to the defense. If you have to go out there and your players are memorizing what’s going on, you’re going to struggle a little bit.”
There’s no certainty that Lynn’s scheme and approach will pay dividends, especially not immediately, but the preparation has put USC in a position to immediately improve upon last year’s performance. The bar may be low, but the goals Lynn and the rest of the defense have for themselves are much higher.
“You’ve seen what he did in one year at UCLA made them one of the best defenses in the country,” linebacker and Oregon State transfer Mascarenas-Arnold said. “And so for me, I expect nothing less. I don’t think anybody else on the team wouldn’t say that either. So I think we have the potential to be one of the best.”
MUCH OF HOW USC navigates a schedule that includes LSU, Michigan, Penn State, Washington and Notre Dame may still come down to Moss. This is a Riley offense and team, after all, where the attacking unit is the show and the quarterback is the orchestra’s first chair.
Williams had his approach and style; Moss has his own. The connectivity between them should have the intended effect. Several of the players that Moss first practiced with on scout team during his early years at USC are now projected starters themselves.
“I’ve already had chemistry with Miller because that first year we were both here, we always connected in practice really well,” said wide receiver Kyle Ford, who was at USC for two full seasons before transferring to UCLA last year and back to USC this year. “Now it’s just a continuation of what that’s been. I’m glad that we didn’t lose it over the years.”
It is not quite an intangible, but Moss’ commitment to USC over the years is now reaping its rewards, not just in the form of a starting job he coveted, but more in the form of how his peers, teammates and all of those who will take cues from him as a leader now view him.
“He’s going into his fourth year at USC and so I think all the guys have a different level of respect for him and what he’s done his whole journey,” Branch said. “He is far and away the leader of this football team. I think he has really just been able to bring the team together. Everyone rallies around him.”
Moss’ six touchdowns in the DirecTv Holiday Bowl that all but secured him the starting gig was just the beginning. Since, he admitted he’s gone through a learning curve as he tries to ensure that his performance in December is not remembered as an aberration, a mere blip on his college career, but rather a harbinger of what he can do once this season begins.
Now that he’s in the driver’s seat, Moss has gained a level of comfort and personal experience inside Riley’s system. Everything he tried to soak up while sitting on the bench the past two seasons is now ready to be put to use.
“At the end of the day, I think it’s more about what you do with it than just being named the starter,” Moss said. “It’s about going and winning games.”
Riley, Moss, Lynn and the rest of USC’s team know as well as anyone that in the end, all of the extra work, the effort put into weight training or nutrition, into improving the makeup of this team, can be rendered meaningless in the span of a game, even a play. For all the change USC is experiencing in its first year without Williams, there is one thing that remains: it will all come down to results.