After nine days of chaos and uncertainty, during which 19 of his players left USC for the transfer portal, Lincoln Riley found himself longing Wednesday for a time, not so long ago, when the process of building a college football team was less opaque, teams were equally allotted 85 scholarships, relationships were forged in living rooms and decisions were made with more than money in mind. But now, Riley lamented, that was long gone.
In its place was a colder, more professional model, with much less clarity for all parties involved. College football, he said, was now “more of a business than it’s ever been.”\“I don’t think any of us could have predicted, I guess, just how quickly it has changed, how fundamentally it has changed,” Riley said. “I think the whole college football world is trying to adapt right now, which is, honestly, I think for everybody a little difficult to keep up with.”\That world had never felt so far away at USC as it had last week, as former top prospects whose living rooms the coach once sat in left in droves for the transfer portal. Among them were two five-star receivers in Zachariah Branch and Duce Robinson, both of which were seen as two of the coach’s biggest recruiting victories at USC, as well as Branch’s older brother, Zion, himself a top-60 recruit in the 2022 class. Those departures unleashed a torrent of criticism of Riley, who has now lost nine of the 12 top-100 recruits he signed in the 2022 and 2023 classes, including all four of the five-star recruits he’d signed. “Are we adapting? Certainly,” Riley said. “Are some of the decisions we made a few years ago — would we have made those in this current climate? No, we definitely would have done different things.”\To Riley, there was a clear-cut explanation for the exodus. Many of the portal decisions made over the last week, Riley suggested Wednesday, had largely come down to money. And it wasn’t just players making “business decisions” eithe