USC football recruiting is back in prime form, as the Trojans are well on their way to building one of the most elite classes in the 2026 cycle. Lincoln Riley boasts the top-ranked haul in college football eight months out from National Signing Day, and the USC class leads the nation by a wide margin. The majority of the 22 commits in the eye-catching group hails from the state of California, which marks a return to in-state dominance for the proud program and caught the eye of 247Sports national recruiting analyst Cooper Petagna.
“I think USC is going to finish with a top-10 class,” Petagna said on “The Ultimate College Football Show” this week. “I don’t think the floor is going to bottom out. I think USC, Lincoln Riley, Jen Cohen, their AD, they’ve done a good job to course-correct and fix a problem that they’ve had.”
Following back-to-back years outside the top 10, USC set the foundation for its best class of the Riley era. Five-star linebacker Xavier Griffin headlines the bunch and could be the kind of talent that lifts up a much-maligned defensive unit in the years to come.
There are already seven top-100 commits in the USC class, and five of them play their high school ball within state lines. What’s more, of the four prospects in California’s top 10, two are USC-bound and another could be on the way.
“You think about what they looked like last year and you talk about all those defectors in that class, you had 13 different states represented in USC’s class,” Petagna said. “That’s indicative of going a long way from home to try to find your talent. This year, only six. They also have 13 players from the state of California. That’s the most in the Lincoln Riley era. So we talk a lot about these general managers and what role they play; USC has an identity for the first time under Lincoln Riley on the recruiting trail, and it’s showing and paying dividends in a big way.”
USC opened the previous cycle with a hot start, too, but a flurry of high-profile decommitments haunted the Trojans. Five-star prospects Justus Terry and Isaiah Gibson, both from Georgia, backed off their commitments and flipped instead to SEC programs. That trend could be a thing of the past with the Trojans’ renewed West Coast emphasis.
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“This USC class over the last couple of years, it was fluffed up,” Petagna added. “So when it was ranked high in the spring, it was hard to put a lot of confidence in it. This one is built on substance. So that’s why I’m saying this one’s an outlier in a positive way.”
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