Musings from Arledge: An Offseason Grab-Bag of a Musings

The college football playoff is apparently like a goldfish; it will naturally expand to fill its surroundings. Four became twelve. Twelve will soon become 16. The Big Ten wants 16 to become 24. And how can we possibly stop at 24? Isn’t it unfair for the 25^th-best team to be left out? 

So a couple of thoughts. First, it’s ridiculous to have 24 teams. You’ll have teams playing far too many games, for one thing. I know this is a professional sport now, but having these guys play 16 games or so is just too punishing on the body.

You’d also have teams that don’t deserve to be in any playoff. Of course, I opened the final regular-season poll to see who number 24 was in order to prove how stupid the Big Ten’s proposal is … and I saw that James Madison University was 24. Oops. I guess we’re already doing stupid things in the playoff. Still, team number 24 is not winning four games. You can decide the rightful champion without them.

The Big Ten is asking for too many teams. But at least the Big Ten’s proposal includes getting rid of conference-title games—which make no sense any more—and frankly the Big Ten’s idea may be the only way to save the regular season. It used to be that, for national-title contenders, every single game mattered. One loss could ruin your season. Two always did. 

I then worried for years that an expanded playoff would ruin the best regular season in major sport—again by diluting the value of each individual game. Now two losses is probably okay for the top teams, but three is deadly. (Note how that gives you a couple of mulligans over the old system, which is why the games don’t mean as much.)

But now that everybody has decided the key to the regular season is to play the weakest schedule possible—Schedule Like Champions, Notre Dame!—maybe the Big Ten is onto something. 

So I’ll make my peace with 24 teams if we do the following. Cut the conference championship games. Make every conference play nine conference games, and disallow any non-conference games outside of the Big Four conferences. And that includes independents. Notre Dame can join a conference if it wants to make a playoff. You don’t get to keep rigging your schedule and cutting your own TV deal. (Not that your next TV deal will be worth much when your new scheduling philosophy involves nine home games and an annual rivalry game against Mater Dei’s junior varsity team. You may not want to play USC early in the season, but I doubt NBC wants to pay huge dollars to watch Notre Dame run through the equivalent of a Conference USA schedule.)

---

Schools, it’s time to give up the pipe dream of getting favorable federal legislation to fix the NCAA problems. In case you haven’t noticed, Congress hasn’t been particularly competent for many years now. They can barely keep the lights on. Waiting for them to help you is like relying on the couple in the meth house down the street to help kickstart your next business venture. They’re probably not going to get motivated to do anything, and even if they do I’m not sure you want that help. Congress messes up just about everything it touches. Besides, being that a lot of people in Congress are skeptical of taking power away from the players—which is always the NCAA’s key goal—it’s just not going to happen.

Make the players employees and collectively bargain. I know you don’t want that liability, and I know we’ll all flip out the first time college football players go on strike. But there’s too much to get fixed to keep waiting on this.

We obviously still need to fix this unlimited free agency thing. Allow long-term deals and enforce them. A player can’t leave the Cowboys or the Dodgers in middle of a long-term contract to go play for somebody else. It’s ridiculous to let highly paid college players do it.

And we have to get a handle on this eligibility thing? Guys are now going to play eight or nine years!? Nine years after high school I had been practicing law for two years. And five entire classes of high school graduates behind me had moved through the college-football system and moved on with their lives. It’s ridiculous to play college football for almost a decade. It’s ridiculous to play college football from your 18^th birthday until your 27^th. 

The individual schools should stop supporting these requests but they won’t. Having guys who are almost at the average NFL retirement age can be an on-field advantage, so they’ll keep doing it until the rules change. And don’t forget that all of our complaints about the NCAA are ultimately complaints about the individual schools, ours. It is the schools that band together to keep all the money and were so blatantly unjust and corrupt in their enforcement of the unfair rules that the courts finally stopped playing along. 

So it’s about time the schools got out of their own way. Collectively bargain. Get a deal. Fix free agency. Set reasonable compensation rules. Cap eligibility at five total years. Let’s get started already.

---

I was not a fan of promoting Skyler Jones to defensive tackles coach. Over the next couple of years, defensive tackle may be the most important position on the football team. (In fact, other than quarterback, I’m not sure any part of a football team is more important than the defensive line. It’s hard to have a bad defense when your front four are unblockable.) Guys like Jahkeem Stewart, Floyd Boucard, Jaimeon Winfield, TomTom Topui are not only special talents, but they play a position that is hard to recruit in Southern California. (A huge percentage of the top defensive tackles come out of the South.) We have a short window with top-shelf talent. So having a coach who can develop that position is one of the keys to USC’s short-term success. 

That’s why I wanted a proven developer, not a young guy with some limited experience, and I wasn’t excited about promoting from within when the position Jones assisted with underperformed significantly in 2025 based on preseason expectations (which were set by the coaching staff in public comments, including statements from Eric Henderson himself).

That being said, USC did not pull a young and inexperienced coach away from another program. Riley promoted a guy who has been around, somebody he and the other USC coaches know very well.  And we have seen similar hires—hires that seemed underwhelming at the time—work out splendidly; just look at the other side of the ball where Zach Hanson did a spectacular job leading his MASH unit last year.

The players also seem excited about Jones’s promotion, although I don’t put much stock in that. You don’t make major hiring decisions based on what guys on the team think. They almost always want their coach to get promoted, and they’re too young and inexperienced, and too close to the situation to remain objective. So their stamp of approval is, well, not compelling. There’s a reason you have athletic directors and head coaches make hires instead of just having a team vote to fill every opening. But I suppose their approval is a nice side effect in a day when guys can basically pick up and leave at any time.

So at this point it makes sense simply to watch and see how it all shakes out. It’s okay to have reservations—I have them—but there’s no reason to believe that this hire will fail. Riley and, presumably, Gary Patterson think the guy can do the job, and Patterson is so experienced and such a master of his defense that he should be able to bring a young coach along. So I choose to remain cautiously optimistic.

---

But that topic reminds me of something: I’m really looking forward to seeing what a healthy Jahkeem Stewart can do after a full year of offseason training. He’s the next great one inside for USC. 

And I’m also looking forward to seeing this freshman class. And I’m looking forward to seeing if Gary Patterson can instill some discipline in this defense and maybe find a way to get after the quarterback. I’m excited to see another year of growth in the offensive line and see whether Jayden Maiava can make another big jump.

I hate the offseason. You wait all year for college football, and then it’s over in a flash. I want to get this thing rolling again.

---

It was great to see Leonard Williams and Uchenna Nwosu play important parts in a Super Bowl victory. But it was especially great to see Sam Darnold put a capstone on one of the great career resurrections in NFL history. That guy came to USC when a former #1 overall recruit was already in the QB room, and he committed even though a much higher ranked guy was already committed in his class. And he wasn’t intimidated. 

And he had to deal with a head coach in college who had more hugs than clues and was never going to build a program. And then he was trapped in NFL hell with terrible franchises and no hope. And then he gets cast aside by Minnesota right as he had become a very good NFL starter. And he goes through all of that with, by all accounts, a fantastic attitude and finally wins a Super Bowl. Congrats, Sam. Rose Bowl winner. Super Bowl winner. Winner at life. A great Trojan.

---

It’s the offseason, which means we don’t have as many obvious topics for articles and conversations. On Inside the Trojans Huddle, that means unless we find some interesting topics very soon, we’ll have to propel the show through our personalities rather than substance. And if you’ve ever watched us, you know how grim that would be.

So what do you want to hear about? Give me your suggestion for future show topics and we’ll indulge them if they’re intelligent or fun.