LOS ANGELES — This tightrope was as razor-thin as humanly possible, and yet USC somehow managed to find a balance, tiptoeing its way toward a simpler 2025 schedule without freefalling into a chasm of lost tradition.
For decades, the football program’s unbroken streak of never playing against an FCS team – the longest in college football – has stood as a source of pride and tradition for a university brimming with it. When USC announced a future matchup with lower-level UC Davis in 2019, backlash from fans came swift and fierce, with the university reversing course and cancelling the Aggies matchup a year later.
“Preserving our history is critically important to us and to our fans,” former Athletic Director Mike Bohn said then on a 247Sports podcast, “so we worked to make that happen.”
In a rapid era of change for college football, though, USC has been forced to continually grapple with the virtue of preserving such history while also positioning itself to be most competitive in a stacked Big Ten and the expanded 12-team playoff. And with questions floating as to the future of the program’s scheduling under Coach Lincoln Riley, the program has thus far managed to do both – on Wednesday, announcing it had inked a season opener against Missouri State come 2025.
Quite literally, it’s the closest possible situation in which USC could face an FCS program without actually facing an FCS program. Missouri State is currently in the FCS, but will transition up a level come 2025; that USC matchup will be the Bears’ first game as an FBS school.
“Obviously, you’re kind of working on a short timeframe, so there’s not just a million options,” Riley said, asked on a Thursday Zoom with reporters about scheduling the matchup. “A lot of people’s schedules are set, so you’ve got – of the options, we felt this was the best option when you look forward and what our schedule is going to be and what we already play in the nonconference.”
Filling out the 2025 schedule with Missouri State, ultimately, gives the Trojans a much-easier nonconference weight than this season, when they took on then-13th-ranked LSU in their season opener in Las Vegas. And as Riley tries to position his program for a continued evolution into an annual CFP contender in the Big Ten, he has continued to hint that USC could shy away from scheduling marquee nonconference opponents.
“If the conferences stay the way they are, or if the playoff stays the way that it is right now, then I think you’ll see less and less of those,” Riley said during July’s Big Ten media days of big-time matchups with out-of-conference programs. “Especially with us and the SEC.”
In a bit of intrigue, though, multiple national outlets reported that Big Ten and SEC athletic directors are set to meet in Nashville, Tennessee next week to discuss a potential scheduling partnership between the two conferences. If such an agreement became a permanent fixture on USC’s schedule – as Riley hinted on Thursday – it could force continued evaluation of USC’s nonconference scheduling habits.
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Chief among them, ultimately, is another massive point of tradition for USC: the longtime rivalry with Notre Dame. After Riley suggested in July in Indianapolis that USC could be forced to move away from the yearly matchup with the Fighting Irish, Notre Dame’s athletic director Pete Bevacqua told The Athletic in July that they had “every intention in the world” of preserving the rivalry. But if USC winds up locked into a permanent every-season battle against an SEC opponent, it would be a difficult proposition scheduling-wise to also line up the powerhouse Fighting Irish.
“Hopefully, like any decisions you have to make, hopefully ones can fall in line where we can maintain all of our traditions and all of the things here and also do the best for USC football,” Riley said Thursday, asked about the Missouri State matchup and USC’s future nonconference scheduling, including Notre Dame. “And if we get to a point where we have to make a decision one way or another because those things don’t necessarily coexist, then we’ll make the best decision we can.”
That decision, if NCAA leaders reach a certain consensus in Nashville, could mean abandoning one of the integral games in the soul of college football. But Riley, still, made one thing plainly clear Thursday.
“I know this,” Riley said, “our strength of schedule is not going to be an issue. We’re going to try to balance it the best we can.”
