Luca Evans (OC Register)  —  LOS ANGELES — The extra 18 pounds pop off Marquis Gallegos’ shoulders, the safety’s frame once reed-thin a matter of months ago at Sierra Canyon High before undergoing a complete physical transformation at USC.

This winter, Gallegos was invited to the Polynesian Bowl, one of the premier end-of-season showcases for high school football recruits. He turned it down – a January vacation to Hawaii, essentially – to stay and work out at USC, trying to get a leg up in a crowded secondary entering spring ball. The results are apparent in his biceps, a safety with standout IQ suddenly adding collegiate-level strength; he’s caught the eye of USC football coach Lincoln Riley himself.

A couple weeks into spring, though, Gallegos still hasn’t received a contract offer from USC’s NIL donor collective House of Victory.

This, of course, is far from the end of the world. In his recruitment process, USC “stood out,” Gallegos told the Southern California News Group back in the fall, because they were genuine. They didn’t toss money around. They did tab Gallegos’ earning potential through House of Victory at a baseline of around $75,000, his father Sam Gallegos said, similar to other programs recruiting his son.

But as of now, Gallegos isn’t guaranteed to receive any NIL earnings his freshman year – until and unless he earns a separate endorsement deal or USC’s donor collective sees enough value to give him a check.

“The way I see it is, if they’re not giving it to him now, it means they kinda don’t think he’s a face they can push and promote right now,” Sam Gallegos said. “But I’m so confident in him … where eventually, when we do get invited to one of those House of Victory or anything, we’ll be able to negotiate.”

For years, the reality of NIL at USC has been complicated, as the school has dipped its toes cautiously into the waters of collegiate earning potential. NCAA rules have long mandated against collectives communicating directly with recruits, leaving initial conversations around valuation to come directly from coaches and athletic personnel. And without a legitimate contract offer, those conversations can get and have gotten lost in translation – subject to the real-life resources and view of House of Victory.

Plenty of families and parents of football players, including Sam Gallegos, are perfectly content. But several others, speaking on condition of anonymity so as not to risk playing time or negotiations, have expressed frustration with their son’s NIL pay at USC – in amount, organization of payment or feeling valuations were made in recruiting that didn’t align with their eventual earnings.

“It’s like a handshake,” one USC parent told the SCNG. “And when you handshake, and it’s Lincoln Riley on the other side and USC, you think to yourself, ‘Well, they got money, right? We’re not going to get (expletive). They’re good for it.”

“Right, you would think to yourself, ‘Oh, USC’s good for it, you’re going to get it,’” the parent continued. “And then you’re shocked when you don’t.”

A clear solution to that disconnect, though, has recently emerged. In late February, after an all-out pushback to a reported NCAA investigation into the University of Tennessee, a Tennessee court granted a national injunction blocking the NCAA from enforcing any NIL restrictions. Suddenly, pay-for-play concepts are wide-open, the transfer market and recruiting landscape becoming a sanctioned arms race unlike anything seen before in college sports.

“I mean, everybody else is going to be super-charging their collectives, funding them at whatever level it will take,” said Jodi Balsam, a sports law expert at Brooklyn Law School. “‘Cat’s out of the bag. We’ve gotta go buy us some athletic talent.’”

And after years of defensive driving behind NCAA restrictions, USC looks primed to shift into turbo. With a brand-new coaching staff and a swelled House of Victory budget, the program’s been on a recruiting spree in the wake of the Tennessee injunction, nabbing 10 new commits in the class of 2025 across just the last three weeks. The key, ultimately, lies in simple ease of communication: Suddenly, USC’s NIL collective has full autonomy, House of Victory executive director Spencer Harris said, to interact with recruits and offer them legitimate NIL contracts before they ever arrive at USC.

“If we can’t be in the conversations and educate properly, and even be the ones having the conversations, it’s going to result in issues and misinterpretation of value and expectations,” Harris told the Southern California News Group. “So I do think, with some of these rules evolving, it’ll benefit some of these problems that have occurred.”

‘It’s just confusing’

All these months later, one parent of a player on USC’s defense wishes he’d asked the finite questions upfront.

When will my son be paid? 

How much is he going to be paid? 

How frequently is he going to be paid?

When they visited USC, the parent said, they’d had a meeting with USC general manager Dave Emerick, and were offered an NIL valuation through House of Victory – lower than what other programs were offering. But they chose USC in the end, ultimately, because of the chance to play for Riley, and the comfort pitched to them: an apartment for the player, a car, and the still-robust number offered.

But what House of Victory offered once the player arrived was half of what they’d originally discussed on their visit, the parent said. And that contract was broken down into a combination of passive and active income they didn’t expect. According to a screenshot of the contract provided to the Southern California News Group, the player would be paid a monthly sum for House of Victory to use his name, image and likeness; an additional payment in the contract hinged on a certain amount of promotional deliverables being met, such as the completion of a post on social media or a “Physical Event appearance.”

And quickly, the apartment became more a burden than a comfort – the player forced to pay rent of his own accord off his salary from House of Victory. Both recurring usage-rights and completed-deliverable payments came inconsistent, not on a first-of-the-month or biweekly basis, according to a screenshot of the parent’s bank-account alerts.

Eventually, the player was dinged enough for late fees on rent that the parent reached out several times to USC to express frustration – “wasn’t pretty conversations,” to try to reach a solution of consistent pay. They ended up receiving the full value of the contract. But the memory of a larger valuation still lingers.

“It’s just confusing,” the parent said. “I don’t really know. Like, at the end of the day, it just feels like – just got duped.”

At a micro level, the lack of knowledge around House of Victory’s methods and USC’s NIL approach in general has confused and frustrated several families. Multiple parents told the Southern California News Group their sons had to pay out of their own pocket – not included in their contracts – for off-campus apartment housing, one saying rent was as much as $3,000. One parent told the SCNG they believed the baseline pay for football players offered an HOV contract last year was around $30,000. Another told the SCNG it was $33,000. Confusion reigns.

Harris declined to comment on any specific anecdotal complaints on House of Victory’s operation. He generally emphasized contracts were structured individually and according to NIL payments, and players shouldn’t expect to receive the same amount of money each month.

“It’s not an employee salary,” Harris said. “So, there’s just some natural confusion with that. But that’s what happens when it’s a brand-new space, and the NCAA – and college athletics overall – like, the lack of clarity and guidelines around it has led to some of this confusion across the board.”

House of Victory, ultimately, has to support two interests – the desires of Riley and USC’s staff in building a program, and their own budget based on the funding they receive from donors. The collective budgets by calendar year, operating on largely fixed reserves in 2023 and 2024.

Within that process, the collective decides to offer players contracts based on a sort of valuation system, evaluating USC athletes and placing them into tiers based on “what we feel is their NIL value to our organization,” as Harris described. From there, contracts are structured around the combination of NIL rights and deliverables, and those deliverables can be weighted – different athletes paid different amounts per each event completed, for example – based on House of Victory’s tier system.

“They give you an activity to do every month – show up at the YMCA, feed the homeless, or something like that,” another parent told the Southern California News Group. “So, you complete a task, and you can get paid for the month.”

Ultimately, Harris put it simply, a majority of families feel players should be earning more than they do. But House of Victory is often at the mercy of USC’s donor base, trying to justify the usage of funds while making sure they’re able to “keep going back to the well,” as Harris put it. There have been instances, he said, where House of Victory hasn’t paid a player in full due to them not completing an event; but most parents the Southern California News Group spoke to said their son had eventually seen the full amount written in their official contract.

“Because of the way the rules are structured, that disconnect happens all across the country, right,” Harris said. “Someone else has to communicate what someone else is doing, so there’s always going to be mixed messages there at times or lines that get crossed.”

“And secondly, we’re still working with families that maybe have different expectations or heard or misinterpreted something that, in the recruiting process, maybe was different than reality,” Harris added.

‘Gotta keep pushing the issue’

In late March, when asked about USC’s NIL situation after one spring practice, Riley took the opportunity to issue a veiled rallying cry – a strong collective, he said, wasn’t just important but imperative.

“You want things to get better, you’ve gotta, you have to do something about it,” Riley said. “Behaviors have to change. You have to tear things and build down new facilities, you have to bring more money in, you have to bring in great coaches, you have to raise more NIL. I mean, like, you’ve gotta, you gotta keep pushing the issue.”

And USC’s situation, Riley emphasized, had taken “some monster leaps,” both since he’d arrived at USC in 2022 and simply in the last several months. New athletic director Jen Cohen has placed an emphasis on unifying USC’s NIL efforts and increasing the strength of the donor base, and in a vacuum, House of Victory is starkly better-positioned than at any point in the past. Harris told the Southern California News Group that there were “significantly” more funds available for 2024 than the previous year – and that the collective was on track to offer contracts to 75-85 players on the team in 2024, which would be roughly three-quarters of the total roster.

“It’s significant,” Harris said, doubling down, “and it’s competitive with some of the numbers that you see or people estimate the top programs have, or spend on their rosters.”

For reference, 10TV, the CBS-affiliate station in Columbus, Ohio, reported in January that Ohio State had already spent $10 million on its football roster for 2024.

At the end of the day, what House of Victory does with those funds will largely rest on Riley’s vision. What the coach wants, by all indications, are recruits interested first and foremost in playing football at USC. As he put it, speaking on NIL in an early signing-day presser: You’re certainly trying to find people that are not overly fixated on it.

Those people exist. They are real. Linebacker Mason Cobb’s father Daniel told the Southern California News Group – as a reason why Cobb transferred to USC from Oklahoma State last year – that Riley never made a concrete NIL offer to them in recruitment.

Cobb’s is a unique case, a kid who cut his teammates’ hair in his dorm room at Oklahoma State to earn some cash. But NIL has become an undeniable factor in recruiting for families across the nation, and even Cobb’s positive experience sketched a larger problem for USC, as they’ve often played conservative pursuant to NCAA rules in the NIL space. In pre-injunction times, Riley, Harris explained, could have a conversation with a recruit, but “can’t be clear about what the actual NIL opportunity is for that person.”

USC’s 2024 class was solid – ripe with defensive depth – but unspectacular on paper, missing out on numerous blue-chips on the West Coast. Since the Tennessee injunction opened the floodgates, however, USC has been on a recruiting heater. In addition to the recent wave of 2025 commits, USC has already received verbal commitments from four players in the class of 2026, the most of any collegiate program in the nation, according to 247Sports’ tracker.

And as open conversation around NIL with recruits and transfers grows like never before, USC and House of Victory have the opportunity to iron out the kinks that have plagued areas of the process.

“I think with a combination of the rules loosening up and us having the proper funding, and just the proper structure overall … is a piece of the reason why you see some of this new, recruiting success,” Harris said.

“Hopefully,” Harris continued a beat later, “this is just the start.”

ocregister.com

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