USC Football Will Be Back When It Builds ‘The Trojan Wall’

USC Football got some wonderful news this week with the verbal commitment of Tanook Hines, the 6’1 185 pound 4-star receiver from Dekaney High School in Houston, Texas. Hines is a prototypical Lincoln Riley Air Raid receiver, built from the similar cloth of a CeeDee Lamb , Hollywood Brown, or Jordan Addison.

Hines’ theoretical arrival is symbolic as it broke a string of recruiting decommitments and strikeouts over the past month with the likes of Isaiah Gibson, Justus Terry, Hylton Stubbs, Justin Hill, and Riley Pettijohn.

All five of those players were not from California and either picked a school within their home state or a Rolls Royce program of today. While it’s commendable and important that USC is recruiting nationally, for the Trojans to truly be back to what they were in the Pete Caroll era, they must wall off Southern California again.

There are only a handful of fertile recruiting grounds in the country – California, Texas, Florida, Georgia, and Louisiana. The fact that one of those grounds is USC’s backyard is a strategic advantage only a handful of schools have and one that can overcome the current challenges of growing its NIL program to truly elite status.

Related: Former USC Trojans Coach Goes Scorched Earth On Paul Finebaum

Historically, the great Miami teams of the 80s built their dynasty by walling off what they called the “State of Miami.”

Georgia’s epic back-to-back national title run of 2021 and 2022 was epitomized by owning the talent pipeline in their home state, as evidenced by their relentlessness in getting Terry and Gibson to decommit from the USC Trojans.

The Vince Young Texas teams, the Tim Tebow Florida teams, and the Joe Burrow LSU team all had a disproportionate number of players from their home states on the roster.

And dare we not mention the prime of the Carroll era from 2002-2008, when it became national news when an elite player from California DIDN’T sign with the Men of Troy (see DeSean Jackson).

USC Football Must Rebuild The Trojan Wall

I get that recruiting is a national game now with social media, NIL, and the transfer portal, but the key to any corporation’s success (and make no mistake, USC football just like any other major athletic program, is a corporation) is to find a competitive advantage that you can exploit, scale, and reuse.

USC has that, and it’s criminal they’re not leveraging it nearly as much as they can or should. Without that inherent competitive mote, success is random, fleeting, and unsustainable. It’s just about every elite high school football player’s dream in the Golden State to don the Cardinal & Gold, and not prioritizing that intent can be catastrophic.

Remember, much of the demise of USC football in the late 2010s can be attributed to having hometown kids like Bryce Young, CJ Stroud, and DJ Uiagalelei slip away from the Trojan’s fingertips.

People ask me all the time, “When will USC football be back?” And my answer to them is “When you see the Trojan Wall erected.”

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