USC Football News: Lincoln Riley Confident in USC's NIL Capabilities

Lincoln Riley , creative with his offenses and with his similes.

Wrapping up the final preseason week of camp before transitioning into game-week mode for USC’s Sept. 1 opener against LSU in Las Vegas, the Trojans’s third-year head coach on Thursday tried to articulate the evolution of his program’s ability to wade into the ever-deepening waters of Name, Image and Likeness recruiting waters.

“I’ve talked a lot about our NIL and how it’s evolved,” Riley told reporters via Zoom . “Yeah, certainly, we’re about to be more aggressive with high school guys than we’ve ever been with it. That’s because our NIL has gotten a whole lot better.

“You don’t want to be going to a gunfight with a knife, and in the beginning we were going to a gunfight with like a toy sword. So, we’re definitely … we’ve made a lot of progress, those folks have done a great job and I think some of it, too, just our strategy and I’ve talked about this some, just our strategy on how many high school guys we’re taking, who we’re taking, what we’re targeting has changed drastically.”

After Riley bounced from Oklahoma to USC mere hours after his last-ever game atop the Sooners ended in an 37-33 loss to heated rival Oklahoma State, his inaugural USC recruiting class was fueled with high-profile additions from the NCAA Transfer Portal.

The biggest names were quarterback Caleb Williams who followed him from Oklahoma and wideout Jordan Addison from Pitt, who was the best receover in the country at the time.

Overall, Riley’s first USC recruiting class in 2022 was tabbed as the No. 70 group in the 247Sports Composite, the industry standard.

The last two years have seen USC post the Composite No. 8 and No. 17 classes, which is a major upgrade from where it started when he first got there and the portal and NIL have played a big role in that.

Riley pointed to a more stable roster that has been designed to lean more into high school recruiting than Portal free agency.

“We have really shifted, as I’ve told you we were going to, we have really shifted not completely away from the Portal, I don’t think we’ll ever be completely away from it,” Riley said , “but you just look at our, you can just look at the numbers, we’re headed to becoming the developmental program that we want to be long-term for the next 10 or 15 years.

“With that there’s been more high school recruiting; there’s going to continue to be more. The high school recruiting takes longer, it’s not as fast and furious as Portal recruiting.

"A lot of times you have to relationships that are developed for multiple years and having some of the consistency that we’ve had on certain parts of our staff for a long time now makes a difference on that as well.

"So, it’s become a bigger part of what we’re doing each and every year here and that’s going to continue to happen. And as long as our NIL continues to climb, we’ll continue to be as aggressive there as we need to be.”

Earlier this week, it was reported that USC missed out on hiring Alabama's general manager Courtney Morgan into a similar executive-level personnel role at USC. The Trojans reportedly offered Morgan a multi-year deal worth seven figures annually, but he stayed with Kalen DeBoer at Alabama for the $800,000 and three-year contract.

Riley's comments come as the landscape of college sports and college football in particular continue to evolve rapidly.