Spring football roundups: Can you play defense in Hollywood?

Can Lincoln Riley's transfer portal necromancery produce a winning roster on both sides of the ball?

Year one at USC went so well for Lincoln Riley’s Trojans that there was actually a push online from SC fans to get defensive coordinator Alex Grinch fired after the unit went from 107th in defensive FEI in 2021 to…still 107th in 2022.

Caleb Williams won the Heisman and USC was a better Pac-12 Championship showing from making the college football playoffs. I’m not sure if it was worse to lose that game to Utah and have Cam Rising mock Williams’ fingernail painting than it would have been to get a #4 seed and face Georgia in round one. Both would ultimately have been painful for the SC fanbase, but both were also indicative of a re-emergent national power.

Those are the sorts of discouraging narratives you want your team to have after two losing seasons in four years. The team was 4-8 the year prior. Folks were high on USC coming into the year because of the talent infusion but they still had to actually put it together and they did.

This offseason the Trojans have added at least six potential starters on defense in the transfer portal to go along with another three potential starters on the O-line and a few others. Lincoln Riley is determined to try and prove wrong my suspicions about how you can’t build winning units at positions where cohesion and unity really matter like the lines and interior defense.

Can his black arts to team-building do the trick in 2023?