LOS ANGELES — At a Newport Beach hotel in April, in a conference room packed full of USC luminaries and donors and donor luminaries, Lincoln Riley first uttered the words he has come to restate profusely over the past couple of weeks: “This is a business.”
He was speaking as part of a USC coaches’ panel at a fundraising event hosted by third-party collective House of Victory, with sheer zeal. He had taken this very job, he professed to the room, in large part because of how well-positioned USC was “to take advantage of this.” The implication there, on a night dedicated to donor checks, was simple. Money.
“My honest perception of this place after a couple of years,” Riley said then, “was, like, all the firepower in the world. Like, things that other people cannot – they couldn’t do it if they wanted to.”
That firepower, in large part, has finally started exploding. House of Victory’s budget to pay players was more than $12 million in 2024-25, and is “significantly higher” for 2025-26, according to a source familiar with the situation. Revenue sharing is coming. The funds will flow at USC.
But Riley’s program, still, is losing players left and right to the transfer portal, at a rate that has increasingly alarmed the fan base. Former five-star recruit Zachariah Branch, and brother Zion, hit the portal on Tuesday. Former five-star receiver Duce Robinson entered a few days before. Ten of Riley’s highest-ranked commitments from his first recruiting classes at USC, in 2022 and 2023, are now gone.
And a large part of the reason, Riley affirmed Wednesday – both from players’ consideration and from USC’s – was simple. Money.
“Yeah, I mean, they have,” Riley nodded Wednesday, asked if he felt money had influenced the decisions of Trojans who are entering the portal. “On both sides, like I’ve told you guys.”
“I mean, let’s, every school, like, you have a budget,” he continued. “And this is what we got to spend. And you got to decide – it’s tough, because we’re not completely professional.”
The lines between college football and the professional model, though, have blurred like never before. Perhaps irrevocably. Look to North Carolina, where 72-year-old NFL legend Bill Belichick has for some reason now thrust himself into the world of recruiting visits and NIL funds. Look across the country, where football programs of all forms are hiring general managers of all forms to manage those budgets Riley mentioned.
It’s probable that USC, too, will look to expand its “front office” operation in the coming months with the dawn of revenue sharing. In the meantime, though, Riley told reporters Wednesday that USC had “used a lot of consultants in the off-season” for input on monetary roster construction considerations, everyone from people in the NFL to people in the business world. And in early December, Riley hinted – after reports of the departures of wide receiver Kyron Hudson and running back Quinten Joyner – that USC was saying no to players as much as players were saying no to USC.
“The reality is, there are just some guys that you either can’t, or are not gonna pay what they want, or you assess their value and it does not … if your value doesn’t match the money, then, it’s not going to go well much longer, right?” Riley said, in an appearance on USC’s “Trojans Live” radio show.
A source with knowledge of the situation, for one, told the Southern California News Group that Hudson’s decision to leave USC was purely about reps and did not involve money. But in general, as Riley pointed out Wednesday, there is a financial component to every decision a player makes in college football’s current era.
There is a financial component to every decision USC makes, too, he pointed out. Multiple times, during a wide-ranging set of answers giving insight into USC’s football operations, Riley pointed to the concept of a “salary cap.” For now, until USC is permitted to pay players directly – with the possible summer 2025 introduction of revenue sharing – that cap comes through House of Victory, with Riley and staffers then tasked with breaking down a total budget into percentages allocated to different positions on the roster. Some transfer portal payment could go, for instance, to a quarterback. Some to a left tackle.
And USC was adapting, Riley affirmed. But given the knowledge of that landscape now, would he have made some of the recruiting decisions he made a few years ago? No.
“Before, again, it was 85 scholarships,” Riley said Wednesday. “This one scholarship doesn’t affect the other 84 … now, you overpay for the wrong person, it affects every other one on the roster.”
This business, Riley said on that earlier radio show appearance, had become “cutthroat.” Gone were the days, even, of his first recruiting class at USC, when commitments would come from sitting in living rooms. There has been no explicit point or mention from Riley of Branch or Robinson or any of USC’s transfer portal departures, in the past couple of weeks.
There is only salary cap. And percentages. And money.
“Right now, you wake up every day,” Riley said, “and you never know what’s coming.”
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