LOS ANGELES — Three years ago, Lincoln Riley came to Southern California from Norman, Oklahoma, because, in part, he saw the vision of a university best poised to take advantage of the metamorphosis of college football.
He said as much on a Monday night in April, speaking on a coaches’ panel at a fundraising event in Newport Beach hosted by USC’s collective House of Victory, driving home hardly-concealed calls to action to a room full of donors and USC luminaries. The school, Riley emphasized with microphone in hand, had “all the firepower in the world.” He left a few words unsaid: that firepower, at the time, could still be better unified.
“It’s about really coming together, true alignment,” Riley said. “Putting all the powers that SC has in one direction, everybody understanding this is what it is, this is where we gotta go. And if we do it together, nobody can do it like us.”
True alignment is taking further shape at USC, three years into a largely conservative foray into the NIL space that has seen collectives rise and fall and occasional parental frustration around House of Victory’s operation. Multiple sources confirmed to the Southern California News Group that Jeff McKay, a co-founder of USC collective Conquest Collective, had joined House of Victory as a board member. McKay’s father J.K., a former USC receiver and longtime athletic department employee, will also join the board, a source with knowledge of the situation confirmed. The news was first reported by The Athletic.
With McKay’s move, Conquest Collective will shut down, leaving House of Victory and the TOMMY Group — an organization that has been quiet of late — as USC’s only NIL collectives.
“It was communicated as, this is the best thing for USC, one group working together, across the board … at the higher level, at least, everyone felt this was the best move,” a source told the Southern California News Group.
Originally under the name “Victory Formation,” Conquest Collective was co-founded in the spring of 2023 by Manny Hernandez, a USC alumnus and financial advisor, and McKay, the grandson of legendary USC coach John McKay. Their foundation added to an already-cluttered NIL operation around USC. As opposed to House of Victory’s nonprofit model, Conquest Collective was built largely as a third-party marketing agency, helping broker NIL deals for student-athletes.
Since her arrival at USC last summer, athletic director Jen Cohen — both in internal meetings and external communication — has tried to centralize House of Victory as the primary collective for donor funds, distributed to athletes in the form of contracts structured in part around event appearances. In recent months, however, McKay had begun working more closely with Riley and USC to try and leverage relationships with historical donors to entice higher-level recruits, seeking donations of above $250,000, according to a source familiar with the situation.
And last week, according to the source, various high-level figures in USC athletics — Cohen, Riley, even USC basketball coach Eric Musselman — pushed hard to integrate McKay into House of Victory. The goal for McKay’s arrival, sources indicated, is to continue building donor relationships to add to House of Victory’s fundraising base.
It’s another bastion to an NIL operation that has rapidly been gaining steam in the public eye, as Riley and Cohen have both made declarative assertions in recent weeks that House of Victory is the most-improved collective in the country. A source with knowledge of the situation confirmed Friday that House of Victory has over $12 million available in NIL funding for the 2024-25 year. That number is still a cut below a program like Ohio State, whose NIL collective, athletic director Ross Bjork told Yahoo Sports in late July, had distributed over $20 million to football players this past season.
True alignment with Conquest’s dissolution into House of Victory, however, could go a long way towards closing that gap at USC.
