FOOTBALL

USC Sunday Buzz: Is This The Next Shoe To Drop?

It’s been about 12 years since Lane Kiffin famously said “commitments mean nothing.”

There is a lot of buzz right now that four-star safety Hylton Stubbs of Jacksonville, Fla., who committed to USC in March, will be the next prized recruit to decommit.

Stubbs visited Miami this weekend and said it had a “very big” impact.

What will be the excuse? USC’s NIL? Miami’s NIL? Just be assured there is always an excuse.

  • It’s a nice touch that diving for the 2028 Olympics will be at the Los Angeles Swim Stadium, where swimming was held for the 1932 Olympics.

54 thoughts on “USC Sunday Buzz: Is This The Next Shoe To Drop?”

  1. Most high school kids are poor even if their parents are rich, so the ability to make some good money on their own will override almost anything else

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  2. With these decommitments striking SC with the force of a Titanic iceberg Wiley must be thinking, “How can I go up against LSU and Michigan without a full deck

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  3. By the way, what is to stop a freshman kid who does well at SC and then transferring to another school with a better NIL contract

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  4. Can still recall a few years ago all these pundits saying that college football players were being exploited. They placed no value on the free education, room and board, and training they received to further a potential NFL career. It’s a billion dollar industry and the players should receive something they would say. Wonder what they think of today’s model. Now your supposed to pay a high school kid hundreds of thousands in advance just to remain competitive in the recruiting wars with no guarantee the kid will actually play 4 years for your school. Don’t think anybody anticipated this scenario.

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    2. You almost make it sound like this mess needs some congressional oversight& regulation….

      #RecruitsWillHaveToDemandProfessorshipsBeforeThatHappens

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  5. if I’m a blue chip college football recruit I’m going with a proven college champion caliber school and coach…right now neither USC or Lincoln Riley fits that bill

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    1. Was it the last second meltdown to Tulane? Was it the blowout losses to archrivals, UCLA & Notre Dame? The last second meltdown to Utah?

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      2. You know the dumbest thing he’s ever done? Keep Caleb in the Pac 12 Championship Game with a pulled hamstring rather than put Moss in…

        #….WeCouldaWonThatGame

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      4. Caleb wasn’t the problem,,,,,,the defense was doing too much arm-tackling which led to a lot of chunk plays. Defense was on the field too long and just wore down.

        Even at 100%, I don’t think Caleb would have overcome the defensive shortcomings, IMO. It was more of the same as in the other loses, just on a bigger stage

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      5. Riley: “It’s hard to fire a defensive coordinator who’s consistently holding teams to 500 yards and 41 points a game.”

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    2. Trojan4life: If he fixes the defense, and I think he is on track with doing just that, it will go a long way to fixing the entire program. Give Riley another year to prove himself. And the other coaches that USC considered, Dave Aranda, Matt Ruhle, and Luke Fickell aren’t exactly lighting it up. It generally takes time to develop a program.

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      2. P. S.

        All kidding aside, I don’t know how the team will handle it if we absorb a blowout loss to LSU…..

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      3. Under Riley the defense shouldn’t have ever been allowed to be so pathetic. I don’t know if he has ever had a dominant defense. Now we can’t even secure 4 n 5 star recruits in our own backyard. The last few coaches have done a lot to damage USC’s reputation as a seriously competitive program

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      4. Agree that we can’t be losing out on 4 and 5 star west coast lineman to Oregon. I think Oregon will win the BIG next year and maybe the national championship. They are very strong in the trenches.

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      5. I think Lincoln Riley’s stock has really gone down and he doesn’t show that he has the drive it takes to turn it around. How champions has Riley won. Even Sark’s Longhorn did better than USC last year.

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      6. he had some poor talent on the defensive side of the ball and a D coordinator who was in over his head. The defense lost the majority of the games.

        Keep the glass half-full!

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      7. you’re overlooking the elephant in the room, NIL stucture…….it’s real

        Ask Nick Saban, part of the reason why he retired

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      9. MG: I don’t see us getting blown out by LSU. Both teams have new quarterbacks as well as new defensive coordinators and lots of transfers so the game should be interesting. But if we should get blown out it is not the end of the world. Alabama beat us down in 2016, we switched to Sam Darnold and had a great year. It can happen.

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      11. The really funny thing about that year: the team came together so well under Darnold that we would have even given Alabama a run for their money in a rematch….. we developed strong lines and a very strong running game to go with Darnold’s passing attack….

        #..AtTheVeryLeastItWouldHaveBeenACloseGame

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  6. Since these high school great footballers are the best in their league, heck, they might be the best in their entire town, they all think they are NFL-bound and college is just a nuisance they have to go through

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    2. Good article Rusoviet. The problem I foresee which is mentioned in the article is how do you distribute the revenue. Since football generates almost all of it, you could distribute roughly 35 million to the football and men basketball teams. The only teams that generate revenue. But I doubt that Folt will do that. She will divide it evenly among all of the roughly 525 athletes so that women in minor sports get as much as the football players. Other schools like Alabama will not make that mistake.

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      2. PLOW I think we’re she to do that she’s going to face a lot of headwind. The days of ‘DEI” are thankfully numbered. If the team wins thus season, as I sense it shall, any move to drain the money maker to enable the weak isn’t the ‘socialism’ that garners support. Just grateful USC doesn’t have a female beer league softball team ‘in situ’ to deal with.

        If Riley wins I believe Folt would have a hard talk via Rick Caruso.

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      3. Agree Rusoviet. But MG asked me to stop being the adult in the room so I said that Folt would divide the money evenly. She will probably give more to minor sports than other programs but the the great majority has to go to football. If the football team is given roughly 25 million to divide among 75 or so players, that some nice scratch -$330,000 per player. Plus there may be collective money and NIL on top of that for the top performers. You looking at most of the starting players making in excess of one million a year.

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  8. $2.5 Billion is earmarked for kids prior to the NIL commencement in 2021. If they award any money to Reggie Bush will they subtract the money he got from the sports agent?

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  9. And how far back will this $2.5 billion retroactive payouts reach, 1967 and O.J. perhaps with the Goldmans claiming legal rights to the dough

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  10. And deciding how this $2.5 billion is to be distributed is, how do they put it, “a piece of cake”

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  11. SC was 3rd in the nation in 2023 with about 41 points scored per game and something like 110 in the country in giving up approximately 34 points per game

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    1. 41 -34…..just the way Riley likes it…..

      #UnfortunatelyWeDidn’tScore41PointsAgainstOurArchrivals

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  12. After reviewing the LSU OL I have a suggestion for LR for a game plan…….pray…….after LSU is done with us the BIG will know what to do……every week……run right, run left, run up the middle. Did we recruit a DL player over 290…….or a transfer……nope. They are going to beat the s— out of us.

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    2. Agree that we are most vulnerable on the d line. But this should improve somewhat. Grinch had the line stunt or slant to the left and the o line would just pivot and force the line further left and out of the play. The back would then just move in the opposite direction and have huge holes to run through. Saw that with Tulane, Cal, Washington and other games. The change in defensive coaches will eliminate some of this nonsense.

      Wish we would have gotten NT Derrick Harmon from the transfer portal but evidently the price was purportedly too high. Had we landed him, 6’4′ 330 lbs. and all BIG last year, I think our defense would be in the top 20. Sometimes you just got to hold your nose and pay the fee. Oregon did and that is why they are favored to win the BIG this year.

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  13. Hard to believe it is 70-days or a mere 10-weeks to the LSU game

    Hard to believe Wiley has enough quality players to do anything in the Big

    Glad to believe that the SC kid who killed the transient did so with the mistaken but reasonable belief that the deceased was reaching for a gun, but still the entire thing is a tragedy because the deceased was seriously mentally ill and kept saying that “I’m in my car, I’m in my car”

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      1. ..and only 1 day after that Gabby tries going over Niagara Falls in a barrel …..

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  14. After all this analysis of SC’s 2024 prospects the biggest question mark is what does ‘Miller-Time’ bring to the SC-table, and I predict he will be a Heisman candidate

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  15. Trying to imagine what Wiley tells his wife–

    “Honey, we don’t have to worry about the mortgage being paid ever again but I am scared to death about the beating my football reputation is about to take. Yeah, that damn-nation L.A.-crowd ran me over the coals because of my hanging on to my buddy-Grinch too long, and I probably am not going to win any converts this year with the slim-pickings of a roster I’ve got, but who cares ’cause we’re richer than them all and one day we can look back on these ‘hell years’ and laugh about it all the way to the bank

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  16. As mentioned already by Plowhorse – there are a lot of 3rd year coaches that have yet to prove their hire – Kelly-LSU, Fickell-WI, Venables-OK, Cristobal-Miami, Freeman-the princess, and 2nd year Ruhle-NE, 6th year Day-OH St., 11th yr Franklin-PA St.

    No one has produced more Heisman winners in less time than Riley – no one. I trust him to get this right and if he learned anything these past 2 years it is to 1. quit be loyal to a friend at the expense of your players and 2. never let any player have the control that Caleb Williams had these past 2 years..

    Anyone expecting anything different from Clemson? I’m not – Swinney is a great head coach that time has passed. He not only hates NIL he’s totally flummoxed on it.

    If the defense holds serve we’ll be fine – as to all the rest of the ‘chicken littles’ grow a pair – man up

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  17. Just read a shallow article by the president of USC (the South Carolina kind) who had no idea where the NIL situation was headed but said that the current “model” is not sustainable

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  18. Yucla’s basketball coach ‘Crowin’ said a large infusion of NIL cash came in after last season’s disaster and he was able to ‘buy’ some of the best talent in the country.

    It only takes a few players to make up a championship basketball team (versus football), why can’t SC do the same?

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  19. Scooter,

    Will SC host any baseball games for the Olympics? I can see this happening for the beggining rounds being played there. This is due to having a new stadium compared to that dump called dodger stadium.

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