USCs

Happy New Year, and welcome back to the Times of Troy newsletter. So much has happened since we last hit your inbox. The USC-Notre Dame rivalry officially was scrapped (until 2030, at least). D’Anton Lynn took the defensive coordinator job at Penn State, his alma mater. And USC finished its season with a brutal last stand at the Alamo Bowl.

Now the most critical offseason of Lincoln Riley’s tenure with the Trojans lies ahead. The next few weeks especially could make or break the coach’s future at USC. And it all starts with hiring a new defensive coordinator.

Whoever is hired steps into a pressure cooker from the very start. The heat already has cranked up on USC’s coach. If the Trojans don’t make the College Football Playoff, Riley and his coordinator-to-be-named-later could be looking for new jobs at this time next year. And just making the playoff is going to require serious progress on a defense that must replace key players at every level and faces Indiana, Ohio State and Oregon next season.

It might be tempting, with that in mind, to try to maintain continuity, to circle the wagons and promote from within, hoping it’s enough to push USC into the playoff. This idea started taking hold as days dragged on after Lynn’s exit and fans’ panic started to pique: Maybe it was most prudent, the logic went, to promote defensive line coach Eric Henderson to coordinator.

After all, he called defensive plays in the bowl game. He’s a beloved assistant and top-notch recruiter. Not to mention that Georgia Tech, his alma mater, is interested in him for its staff.

Hiring someone else might mean not only losing Henderson in the staff shuffle, but also potentially losing key players or recruits along his defensive line. Several of those players, including five-star freshman Jahkeem Stewart, have publicly endorsed Henderson for the job.

Look, Henderson is a really good coach. And it’s great that his players think so highly of him. But now is not the time to make him — or anyone else on USC’s staff — the defensive coordinator.

That’s not a reflection on Henderson or secondary coach Doug Belk so much as it’s a reflection on the moment. Riley can’t afford for this coordinator hire, his third in five years, to fail. Not after all the resources that USC has poured into this next season being the culmination of its overhaul of the football program. To hand the defense to anyone other than a proven coach with a track record of immediate success is a risk that Riley just can’t take. Not now.

The question is whether any proven coaches are willing to take a risk with USC.

That’s not to say the right coach can’t step in next season and immediately make the Trojans a top-25 defense. Pete Kwiatkowski seemed to fit that profile. He has deep college experience, a close connection to athletic director Jennifer Cohen and a defense that just two years ago was among the top in college football. That he was let go by Texas just before USC lost its coordinator seemed like kismet.

But as of Sunday night, according to the Athletic, Kwiatkowski was trending toward becoming Stanford’s defensive coordinator.

Stanford.

Now I don’t know where Kwiatkowski stood in the pecking order of candidates for USC. Nor is USC doomed if it doesn’t hire him.

But that’s the profile of a coordinator that should get the job. A proven coach capable of getting the best out of USC’s talent and turning the Trojans into a playoff-caliber defense in the way his predecessors couldn’t.

Because if this doesn’t work, Riley won’t get the chance to hire a fourth.

Transfer portal notes, Week 1

Former Auburn wide receiver Cam Coleman, the most coveted player who’s not a quarterback in the portal, is scheduled to meet with USC.

(Michael Woods / Associated Press)

—Iowa State cornerback Jontez Williams became the first big-name commitment out of the portal for USC, and he’s a big get indeed. Williams started just five games last year before suffering a season-ending injury but was a standout and All-Big 12 second-team selection in 2024. Securing a No. 1 cornerback was always a top priority for USC in the portal, and the Trojans managed to find one within two days. A good start. Presumably Williams was paid to start next to Chasen Johnson or Marcelles Williams next season.

—USC is in the market for a top receiver and has a visit set up for Thursday with Cam Coleman, the most coveted portal player who’s not a quarterback. Landing Coleman, a top-five prospect in the 2024 class who played at Auburn, would be a huge coup — and Riley has shown a propensity for pulling in top transfer receivers in the past. Coleman, though, is an Alabama native and is considering Alabama, Texas, Texas Tech and Texas A&M too. His previous recruiting cycle revolved around SEC country. He’s also going to command a massive payday, maybe the largest for any player outside of a quarterback. USC may find it more prudent to use that money elsewhere.

—If USC can’t land Coleman, there still are plenty of viable options available. Expect USC to be aggressive in finding at least one transfer receiver to join the fray. North Carolina State wideout Terrell Anderson, who led the Wolfpack in receiving, visited USC on Sunday. Texas wideout DeAndre Moore Jr. spent time at St. John Bosco and Los Alamitos High, where he was teammates with outgoing Trojans wideout Makai Lemon.

—Linebacker remains a position of significant need, and USC managed to snag the first one that came to visit. Washington’s Deven Bryant was third on the Huskies in tackles. But while he doesn’t strike me as a difference-maker at that position, he was graded higher against the run than any of USC’s linebackers.

—Others to watch on the defensive line: Penn State end Zuriah Fisher, who visited this past weekend, and Clemson tackle Stephiylan Green.

Jaden Brownell, right, may have been the only Trojan to have a good game against Michigan.

(Ryan Sun / Associated Press)

—Of the football players who have yet to be signed, three stand out: Quarterback Husan Longstreet, defensive tackle Jide Abasiri and defensive back Alex Graham. Longstreet is obvious. As a five-star passer prospect, he’d be the heir apparent after Jayden Maiava if he decides to stick around. But it’s a surprise these days if anyone does. Abasiri is an athletic marvel with a ton of unrealized potential as a pass rusher, and Graham earned a ton of praise before having his freshman season derailed by injuries. Keeping two of the three would be a coup.

—The USC men were dominated by Michigan in a 30-point loss. Now Michigan State awaits in East Lansing. That’s a brutal one-two punch coming out of the holiday break, and the Trojans didn’t look ready for the fight Friday. Michigan jumped out to an 11-0 lead, forcing six turnovers in the process, and USC never fully bounced back. No one, outside of maybe reserve forward Jaden Brownell, had anything approaching a good game. The Trojans don’t have long to bounce back, with Michigan State on tap at Breslin Center on Monday. The Spartans are coming off a tough loss at Nebraska and will have something to prove. USC will have its work cut out for it.

—The USC women don’t have the frontcourt to hang with teams like UCLA. Lindsay Gottlieb wasn’t able to lure any top-tier transfer bigs in the offseason, and while that lack of a frontcourt doesn’t always show up against lesser or smaller teams, it was an obvious issue against UCLA and Lauren Betts. I’m not sure where Gottlieb goes from here with the frontcourt if she hopes to be competitive against UCLA the next time around. Maybe Gerda Raulusaityte takes a step forward in the coming weeks before their next meeting. Maybe Kennedy Smith, at 6 feet 1, could just start at the five? (Only half-kidding.) Whatever she does, Gottlieb will be working around this problem the rest of this season.

—Everyone agrees that the college football calendar has to change. So let’s do something about it. There are still two weeks until the College Football Playoff title game. The regular season ended the last weekend of November. That’s way too long to wait even before you consider that three of the four teams that had byes — and the long layoff that comes with them — lost in this playoff. Teams with a bye are now 1-7. But the problems with the calendar go deeper than that. Eventually, when the playoff moves to 16 teams — or more — we’ll do away with conference championship week and move everything up. If you played the first round during championship week, you could be done by the latest on Jan. 8. That’s much more reasonable.

In case you missed it

USC hopes to learn from ‘embarrassing,’ most lopsided loss under coach Lindsey Gottlieb

No. 24 USC can’t keep pace with Morez Johnson Jr. and No. 2 Michigan in loss

Lincoln Riley vowed to fix the Trojans’ defense, but it faltered again in Alamo Bowl

Former USC players sound off on Lincoln Riley and Trojans after Alamo Bowl collapse

No. 16 USC suffers shocking, walk-off loss to TCU in overtime of Alamo Bowl

Meet the Hanson family, the secret to USC’s offensive line success

Lincoln Riley calls out Notre Dame for refusing to honor pledge to play USC

What I’m watching this week

Claire Danes as Aggie Wiggs and Matthew Rhys as Nile Jarvis in “The Beast in Me.”

(Courtesy of Netflix)

Netflix has had a good year in the slow-burn, psychological thriller department, and “The Beast in Me” is another worthy entrant into that group. Claire Danes stars as an author still paralyzed by the sudden loss of her son to a car accident. When she decides to write about her new neighbor — the mysterious real estate scion Nile Jarvis, who is played by Matthew Rhys — she becomes obsessed with determining if the rumors that Jarvis killed his wife are true.

I could do without Danes’ signature lip quiver, but the always-tremendous Rhys is a creepy revelation. Certainly worth your time for a quick, eight-episode binge.

Until next time …

That concludes today’s newsletter. If you have any feedback, ideas for improvement or things you’d like to see, email me at ryan.kartje@latimes.com, and follow me on X at @Ryan_Kartje. To get this newsletter in your inbox, click here.

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?”