Meet the Hanson family, the secret to USC’s o-line success
It’s the final days before the Alamo Bowl, the last gasps of USC’s football season, and Rock Hanson is still getting over a fever.
For USC offensive line coach Zach Hanson and his wife, Annie, who previously was Trojans recruiting director, the timing isn’t ideal to be tending to a sick 1-year-old. The Trojans are shorthanded in trying to finish out a 10-win season on Tuesday against Texas Christian. The transfer portal opens three days after that. And the coaching carousel is already in full swing, with one assistant already gone and Zach garnering outside interest, namely from his alma mater, Kansas State.
But they’ve been parenting long enough now to know not to stress over a fever. And they’ve been working in college football long enough to know the timing is never ideal. Their past decade together has been a testament to that. Last December, Rock was born on early-signing day, hours after Annie had wrapped up USC’s 2025 recruiting class. Two weeks after that, Zach was thrust into a new role as USC’s offensive line coach. They spent the bowl season in a Las Vegas hotel, walking the Strip with a three-week old, in a new-parent-induced delirium, their whole lives having suddenly turned upside down.
“It was a lot of learning on the fly,” Zach said. “We were figuring all of that out together.”
Rock Hanson, son of USC assistant coach Zach Hanson, wears a Trojans jersey while sitting on the team’s practice field.
(Courtesy of Hanson family)
There aren’t many in college football who have navigated all that the Hansons have during the past two seasons at USC. But their resilience has been the beating heart behind an unexpectedly strong season for a Trojans offensive line that overcame its own harrowing hurdles. Even as injuries forced USC to reshuffle the line on a near weekly basis, Zach still guided the group to its best season since 2022.
“To lose all that we lost, then to have all the reshuffling on the offensive line we had, normally that could almost be a death sentence for an offense,” coach Lincoln Riley said. “We’ve had some big challenges. We’ve been able to respond.”
That’s a credit not only to Zach, who has become one of the most critical assistants on USC’s coaching staff, but also to Annie, who has remained an essential part of the program, albeit now in a more unofficial capacity.
That they’ve proven so adept at navigating such adverse circumstances should come as no surprise considering the uphill climb they faced from the start of their relationship. When they first met on a blind date at an Eric Church concert in 2014, Annie worked at Oklahoma in the development office. Zach was a graduate assistant at Kansas State, a five-hour drive away in Manhattan, near where Annie grew up. They hit it off so well right away that both knew they had to make it work. A year in, just as Zach planned to propose, Annie got a job in Chapel Hill, N.C., leading the Tar Heels recruiting office.
For years, they toiled away, rising through the ranks, hoping their paths would converge. They never did for long. They spent the 2015 season apart, before Zach got the job as North Carolina’s special teams assistant coach in 2016. They spent a year together, then hired Annie was hired to run recruiting at Oklahoma in 2017. They spent another season apart, before Zach returned to Kansas State and that same five-hour drive into Oklahoma.
When Kansas State coach Bill Snyder retired, Zach joined Riley’s staff as a grad assistant in 2019, finally back at the same school as his wife. But in 2020, Tulsa offered him a job two hours away, coaching the offensive line. He took it. They bought a house. And Annie drove two hours every day, there and back, to work in Norman.
It felt, by then, like a blessing.
“You just find a way, right?” Annie says.
Zach dreamed one day of being a head football coach. Annie had gotten into college athletics to someday be an athletic director. At USC, they could pursue those paths for the first time together. Zach coached tight ends while Annie ran the recruiting office. For the first time, it felt like they might stay in the same place for a while. They decided to start a family.
Annie got pregnant in 2024. Then last September, just before the start of the football season, she started to experience serious pain in her leg. One doctor brushed it off. But eventually she went back to the hospital. Another doctor discovered a significant blood clot running from the middle of her calf, all the way up near her belly.
Emergency surgery was scheduled for the very next morning. Annie spent the next six weeks relegated to a wheelchair or a walker. With her husband in the throes of the football season, the Riley family insisted Annie live in the casita of their Palos Verdes home. So for six weeks, while she recovered, Riley’s wife, Caitlin, waited on her every need. “I mean, [she did] everything you could think of,” Annie says, still blown away by the kindness.
After all that, having a baby didn’t feel so daunting. Riley told her to take the time after Rock was born. She still worked from home, setting up recruiting visits for January. She didn’t want other women in the business to think you couldn’t have a baby and run recruiting for a major college football program. But one day, she came into USC’s football office and set Rock up in a pack-and-play in one room while she ran a staff meeting in another. As she spoke to her staff, Rock wailed silently on the baby monitor app on her phone. She couldn’t take it.
USC assistant coach Zach Hanson embraces his wife, Annie, and son, Rock, share a hug on the field at the Coliseum after a USC football game.
(Courtesy of Hanson family)
“I turned to my counterpart [current director of USC recruiting strategy] Skyler [Phan] and said, ‘Girl, it’s your turn. You’ve got it,’” Annie recalled.
She’d already told Riley she was thinking about stepping away. Actually doing so “was incredibly difficult” for Annie, Zach said.
She made it official in March; though, she maintains it’s just temporary.
“My time in college football is not over,” Annie says. “I truly believe whenever I do return, I’ll be a much better leader now that I’m a mom.”
Just as Annie stepped away, Zach set out to put his imprint on USC’s offensive line. Immediately upon taking over the group, he started switching up combinations, to ensure that each linemen learned multiple positions, never knowing which combinations he might need.
He’d also learned over the course of his career how critical chemistry could be up front. If it was off, it could sink the whole season. So he made a concerted effort from the start to bring the group together outside of football.
USC offensive line coach Zach Hanson; his wife, Annie; and son, Rock, join linemen and staff for a group photo in the Trojans’ locker room.
(Courtesy of Hanson family)
“One of the coaches I worked for several years ago told me, the players aren’t just going to come to you,” Zach said. “You’ve got to bring them in.”
So they hosted dinners at their house. Annie baked every lineman their favorite cake on their birthdays. They wanted the linemen to know that they cared about them as more than just football players.
“He’s a great coach,” guard Alani Noa said. “There’s nothing too personal. There’s nothing out of whack. Everything is open as far as conversations.”
They’ve even taken to holding Rock, who’s now already 33 pounds.
“It’s so important to Zach,” Annie says, “that those kids understand, like, ‘You can do this, and we believe in you, and we are going to prepare you to a point of trusting your training. So when you get out on that field, like there’s not even a question, you know, and I think that those guys very much played that way this year.”
USC was without stalwart left tackle, Elijah Paige, for half the season. Starting center, former walk-on Kilian O’Connor, played in eight games. And just two of its starting lineman — Tobias Raymond and Justin Tauanuu — started all 12 games heading into the Alamo Bowl.
USC offensive lineman Alani Noa (77), Amos Talalele (75) and Kilian O’Connor (67) warm up before facing Notre Dame at the Coliseum on Nov. 30.
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)
“This is a position group where it’s not always the most talented guys you throw out there,” Zach said. “It’s the five guys who played best together.”
Zach managed to keep finding those five all season, keeping the front steady all season in spite of injuries. USC gave up just 15 sacks, fewer than all but 14 teams in college football. The line also cleared the way to average 5.29 yards per carry, the highest rushing clip at the school in over a decade.
Other schools are starting to notice. At Kansas State, his alma mater, Hanson’s name has been mentioned as a potential offensive coordinator under newly hired coach Collin Klein, who Hanson described to The Times as “one of my best friends” whose “family is like family to us”. Annie’s family also hails from just outside of Manhattan, Kan.
“That place is certainly a place that’s special to us,” Zach said of Kansas State.
But in the same breath, Zach says he’s “extremely happy [at USC] doing what we’re doing.” It’s not lost on the Hansons how much the Rileys have done for them.
In the coming days, those questions will surely come up again. But for now, the Hansons were more preoccupied with kicking a 1-year-old’s fever and preparing USC to play Texas Christian without three of its top seven linemen.
“Our philosophy has always been, as a family, we’re going to be all in no matter where we’re at,” Zach says.
At USC, that has certainly been the case. That includes Rock, who is a perfect 9-0 at USC games he’s attended heading into Tuesday’s Alamo Bowl — and can now say the word “ball.”
Whether he’ll get to build on that record beyond the bowl game remains to be seen. But there have been other options elsewhere before. Options closer to family, for childcare purposes.
But USC, Annie says, “has made our experience so incredible and worth the sacrifices.”
“We’ve chosen to stay because of how special this place is, you know?”
