USC’s Lincoln Riley says partial scholarships could be in play

LOS ANGELES — They began to hoot in late July, when Lincoln Riley called up Mater Dei High walk-on Josiah Zamora for a post-workout breakdown, USC’s players clamoring before truly realizing what was about to hit them.

“Another reason he’s breaking down,” Riley said of Zamora, speeding up his sentence in anticipation of what was to come, “he’s going on scholarship today!”

The head coach skipped away as hoots became bellows, the entirety of USC’s roster mosh-pitting around the redshirt junior receiver, tackling him with such gleeful ferocity he fell to the turf.

On Thursday, quarterback Miller Moss told media it couldn’t have happened to “a better guy.”

“For him to be able to get his master’s degree paid for,” Moss said of Zamora, “I mean, I think that’s just – life-changing.”

Traditionally, somewhere up to 85 such lives are changed on USC’s practice fields every year, an NCAA-mandated hard cap set on the amount of scholarships Riley and staff can present to a roster well upwards of 100 players. But as tides continue to shift in collegiate athletics, the groundbreaking antitrust settlement with the NCAA – commonly referred to as the House settlement – presents an alternative reality where scholarship limits are a thing of the past, outlined in formal settlement documents filed in the Northern District Court of California in late July.

In addition to the revenue-sharing model the House settlement presents, essentially turning collegiate athletic departments into pro sports franchises maneuvering under a salary cap, scholarship limits would be replaced by flat-out roster limits. As has been widely reported, an FBS football program would be limited to carrying 105 players on its roster. The amount of scholarships offered within that limit, meanwhile, will be fully up to individual schools to decide – meaning Riley and USC will have a variety of factors to consider come 2025-26 if Judge Claudia Wilken approves.

“I don’t know that there’s really a precedent in any sport that I’m aware of that is really set up that way,” Riley said Friday, when asked his thoughts on the scholarship changes. “So because of that, there’s going to be a whole lot of new strategies, and whoever can have the best strategy in the beginning will certainly have an advantage.”

As the settlement outlines, every Power Five school, including USC, will be able to distribute players over $20 million in revenue-sharing and additional spending “over and above” existing scholarship and other benefits. The program, realistically, could choose to elect to offer five additional scholarships. Or 10. Or the full 20.

Or, alternatively, USC could elect to experiment with partial scholarships for players, which Riley affirmed “100% absolutely” could be in play. The question Riley presented: Would a USC scholarship cost the exact same against that salary cap as a scholarship for another program?

Take fellow Big Ten school Ohio State, for example, which estimates their average cost for a non-resident student in 2024-25 is about $40,000. USC’s, by comparison, is close to $70,000. If both programs offered 20 additional football scholarships – valued exactly as their worth under that cap – USC would be spending $1.4 million of that $20-something million, while Ohio State would only be spending $800,000.

“If we do that, we’re going the complete opposite direction,” Riley argued Friday, emphasizing the need for competitive equity.

There’s several more questions to answer, chief among them the role of Title IX, which mandates per NCAA guidelines that “female and male student-athletes receive athletics scholarship dollars proportional to their participation.” If USC chose to hand out 20 more football scholarships, then, they’d really be spending $2.8 million, required to also hand out 20 scholarships among their women’s programs.

“We know kind of generally what it’s going to look like, but there’s a lot of key things that we don’t know yet that would maybe cause you from firmly making a decision,” Riley said Friday. “But we’ve got kind of a base philosophy in our mind of how we’re going to attack it, and it will be a little bit different for each school.”

INJURY UPDATES

Riley said Friday that redshirt freshman cornerback Maliki Crawford suffered a season-ending injury in camp this week, a slight blow to USC’s cornerback depth come 2024. The 6-foot-4 Crawford, who arrived at USC from Pacifica High, recorded an interception in USC’s spring game in April. His absence will place more importance on the readiness of likely backups like Prophet Brown and freshmen Marcelles Williams, Braylon Conley and Isaiah Rubin.

Left tackle Elijah Paige was seen visibly limping out of practice Friday, pausing across the crosswalk and bending over for several beats in obvious pain. Riley clarified Friday that Paige simply “got a lot of work today” and was fine, an important update for a key offensive lineman.