The CFB world has gone absolutely gaga over QB Arch Manning’s commitment to TEXAS.
“The most impactful football recruiting announcement the past decade came without warning,” is how it’s been described by Adam Kramer of the College Football News. “It sent a tidal wave that stretched well beyond the world of football. He’s the most coveted recruit in recent memory. A blueprint is taking shape…”
TEXAS and USC still seem fatefully tied at the hip ever since unstoppable Vince Young beat USC in the most disappointing USC loss I have ever witnessed.
TEXAS is 70-55 over the last 10 years. USC is 76-47.
Everyone (well, most ‘Horn fans) thinks TEXAS is back now.
USC got a new coach and let’s face it, many Trojan fans think we are already back too. Count me in that group.
TEXAS got a new QB and “the overhaul is underway under Sark,” says much of the media. Sustained success is accomplished by finding and developing the best QBs and surrounding them with talent — exactly what Lincoln Riley has done so far at USC.
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Bradenton (Fla.) IMG Academy five-star OT Francis Mauigoa (On3 Consensus #10 overall) will make his final decision in about a week’s time, July 4. Mauigoa went on official visits to Alabama, Florida, Miami, Tennessee and USC earlier this month, and the five-star prospect broke down those schools with On3. Mauigoa entered his trip to USC with some questions but felt that Lincoln Riley did a good job answering them. “Coach Riley is turning that program around,” Mauigoa said. “When we got there, we asked about distractions because of Hollywood. One thing that stood out to me, he said, he kicked out the bad kids. He kicked out like… Read more »
im sure the new staff had to be a little shocked at how poor a program they walked in to. But in a matter of a few months they cleaned it up. I’m ready for this season to get underway with a real staff, plan, and team.
2023 QB Jaden Rashada Reportedly Agreed to $9.5M NIL Contract With Miami Booster John Ruiz to Play for the ‘Canes! “Jeremy Crabtree of On3 reported the 4-star prospect and No. 7 QB in the class of 2023, per 247Sports’ composite rankings, agreed to a $9.5 million name, image and likeness deal with Miami booster John Ruiz and also turned down an $11 million offer from Florida’s Gator Collective. “Jaden left millions on the table,” Michael W. Caspino, who is known as an NIL lawyer, said. “Millions. He did not pick the highest offer. He went there because he loves Miami, the coaches and… Read more »
I hadn’t really considered this predictable ramification of the new NIL world. Just blew right over me, somehow.
But this comment above by Caspino, Rashada’s lawyer, brought it out so clearly.
Now we have the official “NIL lawyer”. The sharks didn’t waste any time getting on the shockingly big NIL money bonanza. Caspino sure did a public number on the Florida Gator Collective. Sounds like they upset the wrong lawyer.
Allen, I might be reading this wrong,but I don’t see where Caspino says he is the attorney for Rashada. I won’t be surprised to hear from Rashadas family denying his involvement. It is just as probable that Caspino is one of those sharks who are trying to get his piece of the pie. I don’t doubt Rashada is going to get a great NIL deal, but I am not convinced Caspino is a legit player. Even though I am skeptical, I am not naive and Caspino could turn out to be as connected as he purports to be. With that… Read more »
Bingo. You’re right. Caspino’s role is uncertain. But what intrigued me most was how he massively trashed the Gator Collective, and was officially referred to as an “NIL lawyer“. They’re here! Beats ambulance chaser!
Lincoln Riley Scores Again USC made a big addition to its off-field football staff on Saturday. On3.com — “The Trojans are hiring Mississippi State SR Assoc AD for Football Dave Emerick as the program’s new general manager and SR AD for football, Emerick announced. He worked with Mike Leach since 2000 at Texas Tech, Washington State and Mississippi State. But now, he’s heading back out west to work alongside Lincoln Riley.” Emerick — “I have had the privilege of working for Coach Leach for 18 years from Texas Tech to Washington State to Mississippi State. We have had a lot of great times and have on… Read more »
What Dave Emerick doesn’t say and can’t say, is in his 18 yrs with Mike Leach, there hasn’t been one championship accomplished under their partnership. There are a number of administrators out there who have accomplished championships including Sosna. In my opinion this is a step back hiring.
Jamaica, did you know who Dave Emerick was before he was hired by USC? If so and you have any information other than what has been provided please share. I follow CFB fairly closely but admit I had never heard of him before his announcement. You express concern that he & Leach never delivered a championship while they worked together. If they were at LSU, GA, AL, or OSU or other top schools I might share your concern. But he has been at Texas Tech and WSU. Both are 2nd or 3rd tier programs and each is in a CFB… Read more »
Trojan5 I should have included Mike Leach as a head coach (at Texas Tech, WSU and so far at Miss.St. I could not find the combination of Leach & Emerick winning any championships during those 18-19 years. Why should we celebrate his replacing Sosna who with Riley did win championships?
Simple answer. The Leach/Emerick team over achieved. A championship is not possible at every school. And WSU & Tech will never win a championship— no matter who the HC is. So sna left and has to be replaced. IMHO Emerick is a worthy successor.
It could be that Leach without Emerick would have been a complete failure. Not saying that is so, but Emerick could have possibly made Leach and his programs much better than had he not been there. Perhaps there is something to him that our new highly respected HC sees which we do not see…yet. Lets give him a chance.
It has been said many times, UT isn’t an easy place for a HC to succeed with the expectation, politics & clics associated with the State high schools, the University and the football program. It is a meat grinder chewing away at a man’s soul and added to that you have a rival TAM & HC that wants nothing more than to keep Texas 2nd in line. Sark in my opinion has yet to show he has the stamina to hold up against major pressure. How long before he starts cracking?
I’ve always thought TEXAS vs A&M was one of the greatest rivalries in CFB (TEXAS leads 76-37-5), though it tends to get overshadowed by TEXAS vs OU and the State Fair thing.
It’s just a crime that since 2011, the Aggies and Longhorns don’t play every year, or at all, anymore. No justice comes from that unfortunate change in CFB, that’s for sure.
If the game which Texas was awarded more points than USC were played in the replay/ challenge era, the outcome would have been different.
I couldn’t help it and had to cave on once again buying Athlon’s Pre-Season CFB mag. 12 bucks now. Still worth it.
Good thoughts on the assignment of Trojan numbers. Interesting, and I agree, though I’m not in favor of retiring numbers in the first place.
Erik McKinney – WeAreSC
Retiring numbers is simply a term and the language could be changed to call them Honored, All Time Greats, or something special and no worry about them being given out again because they are still working numbers, not “retired”. Imagine when a certain number has two or three All Americans that wore it.
Top-five recruit Robert Dillingham (Simi Valley, CA) committed to Kentucky on Friday, giving the Wildcats their second top-30 guard in the 2023 class.
Dillingham originally committed to NC State last December but reopened his recruitment in March. He chose Kentucky over a final four that also included Auburn, Louisville and USC.
espn.com
Is it the ghost of Clay Helton that is scaring these local kids away from USC? LR sure has a lot of work to do. I think if he gets one or two high rated big guys, the others will come.
The residual of mediocrity could be lingering among the minds of local recruits alright. It was so bad you don’t easily forget it. Not that the out of State raiders aren’t still coming around. It probably will take a half of season of LR football to absolutely convince the holdouts USC football is coming back on the fast lane. I look at the 1st year of Trojan football under LR being more successful than PC’s. PC didn’t have the Portal or the new culture of player attitudes of today to turn around a program.
This is a basketball guard, right?
Goes to show you what sport I follow and which one I don’t. LOL
It’s ok, we can still blame hugs.
At first, I was gonna give Andy Enfield a lot of credit for shooting so high (so to speak) for a 5-star shooting guard.
But when I realized Dillingham was from next door Simi Valley, I backed off. USC’s a football school first, and this is another example of that eternal trusim.
2 or 3 years down the road I would love to see a USC-Texas rematch for all the marbles.
I think Matt McConaughey would be a kick listening to in anticipation of the great rematch.
Stranger things have happened.
Nice to see the spotlight shift off of USC for a while and let Texas be examined by every writer in the nation. Not that it hasn’t done USC some good to be so highly watched again, but LR is probably glad the media is beating down the door at Texas letting him have a life for a while. From what I have seen and read there isn’t a great deal of difference between our Malachi Nelson and Manning. We may have gotten the better runner in the end. Sark is recruiting really well and hopefully Texas can be a… Read more »
Maybe Texas got a new headache if things don’t go nicely for boy-wonder Manning. Sark should be sweating rain drops as he will be under the microscope of a number of judges watching his every move: Texas fans, the Manning family and the press who are all over this, evidently. Good luck Texas, be sure you only lose to the very best teams in CFB.
I’m fairly confident that TEXAS and Sark absolutely love the limelight. They’ve been in the darkness and eating it big-time from the world of CFB for a long time. This is their (Sark’s) chance.
I, for one, think Arch Manning will be successful as a Longhorn. He’s already helping the football program every day he sticks with TEXAS (and some hotshots will sign with the Longhorns following Arch). And most think he will definitely stick, including his entire family.
https://twitter.com/USC_Hoops/status/1540423729515098112
Nov 11, 1933 — The Babe watching USC host Stanford for Homecoming at the Coliseum along with President Herbert Hoover and USC President Rufus von KleinSmid.
The Cardinal, then known as the Indians, defeated the two-time defending national champion Trojans 13-7, ending USC’s 27-game unbeaten streak. Howard Jones’ Trojans finished 10-1-1 and outscored their opponents 257-30 that year.
Stanford then surprisingly lost the Rose Bowl 7-0 to the Columbia Lions. USC finished ranked #6 by the AP, Stanford finished #12.
So Stanford scored nearly half of the points scored against USC that year. Wow.
So for those who believe STAN may/will beat USC this season (I don’t, obviously), 1933 is some major long ago historical footing for their feelings. They are playing at the Farm after all this season (is that even an advantage?). I blame 1933 on Ruth’s attendance, darn it!… 😉
I have always thought USC will win against Stanford. In the last 10 years Stanford has occasionally pulled the rug out from under USC, and did it with style in 2021 getting Bohn to fire the USC HC. I look at it the same way RJJ does, we need to be well prepared and this is probably Stanfords last shot for a while at beating USC.
I would say the chances of USC showing up “unprepared” in Palo Alto to beat STAN are slim and none. Frankly, under LR, I’ve never even considered it. I don’t think many others have either. Ya, but they still have to play the games. Got it. But STAN stinks and David Shaw got lost in the weeds big-time somewhere along the way. Athlon Sports already ranks newly reborn USC at #9, and that was before super WR Jordan Addison came aboard. STAN comes in at #69. They’ve lost some of their best staff to other opportunities. Plus, they’re young, fairly… Read more »
I do believe Shaw rode on Harbaughs coattails for several years, getting great running backs and linemen. To bad he couldn’t keep it going if for no other reason than to keep up the reputation of the Pac12. Utah is also going to start to fade back now that USC is coming back to being a real football program. I would love to see Oregon St and WSU both have good seasons to make the Pac12 a little more relevant in the playoff picture.
I used to root for STAN when not rooting for USC (strange because John McKay thought STAN sucked). Andrew Luck and Toby Gerhart cured me of that by hammering USC too badly.
I met the mild-mannered Toby once. He was about 5-10 (max), 235, on his way to the NFL, and 100% muscle. I could easily see why USC couldn’t tackle him.
You overlooked McCaffrey….
What a player, seemingly surgical in his approach to eluding defenders.
Bryce Love wasn’t bad either. He also gashed USC big-time.
In the unlikely event that the Trojans fail or flail at Stanford, I am willing to bet that the outcome will not affect Riley the way it did Helton. (Just a guess)
Helton’s Final Bizarre, Nightmarish Night Last year, 17-pt fave, #14 ranked USC fell behind STAN 42-13 with 9 mins to go in the 4th Q. USC needed a 4-yd TD run from Darwin Barlow with 46 secs left in the game and scored a 2-pt conversion to make it 42-28. LAT — “Standing again amid the wreckage was Clay Helton, the Trojans’ embattled coach, reassuring at the start of his sixth season that he’d steer USC away from its skid. As Helton listened to the now-painfully familiar questions about his uncertain future, he promised USC was on the right track. He… Read more »
I see no reasonable scenario in which USC loses to Stanford.
My grandparents were at that game as they had USC season tickets from 1926-1994 and rarely missed a game, home or away. My grandfather, CA Senator Frank Weller, passed in early 1967 so my family moved into my grandmother’s home in Glendale, CA and I got to attend my first USC game in the Coliseum-the 1967 USC vs UCLA game. My grandmother told me so many stories about the greats of the 1920s and 30s like Morley Drury, Cotton Warburton and Grenny Lensdell, to name a few. The also were at the 1939 Rose Bowl where Doyle Nave came off… Read more »
These stories of generations of families that continue to connect with USC are amazing. Troy is a special place.
Thank you ATL D.D.S. for your comment. I’m very fortunate to have grown up in such a family that supported USC in both spirit as well as financially. My grandfather, who was Alumni Chairman in 1932, organized a fund raiser to send the USC Band to South Bend for the first time. My grandparents took the train to South Bend and saw a thrilling game that year when Johnny Baker dropped back from his position as an Offensive Guard and kicked the winning field goal vs Notre Dame in the final minutes.
I was very friendly with the Grenny Lansdell family, and went to grammar school and HS with his daughter. Grenny, a WW2 hero, who was picked No. 1 by the Giants in the 1940 NFL draft, but got in only one pro season before the war, wrote me a USC recommendation letter, and had starred as a big-time triple-threat All-America at USC from ’37-39, later becoming a commercial pilot with TWA. He was simply, and always, a very friendly, handsome and fantastic guy who everyone admired around town. The Lansdell’s and their daughter (another huge USC fan whose son later… Read more »
Thank you for sharing this wonderful story Allen! Grenny played a few years before my relative, Ted Tannehill, transferred from Notre Dame and became USC’s leading rusher in 1945. He played in the 1946 Rose Bowl game that saw SC get crushed by Alabama (what else is new). Ted was also a hurdler on Coach Dean Cromwell’s track and field team that strung together something like 5-6 National Championships in a row in the late 1930s – early 40s.