Whether you’re a USC fan or a UCLA devotee, whether you’re approaching this coming football season with great expectation or cautious optimism, I think, yes, yes you should.
Be bullish, Bruins fans. Trojans, talk your stuff. The tasks ahead – proving wrong doubters or living up to perennially high hopes – are doable.
This season could be fun. It should be. If USC and UCLA finish where they’ve been projected to in the Big Ten in a media poll – ninth and 15th, then things will have gone wrong.
Because L.A.’s teams are better than that. They ought to be.
If you’re a Trojans fan, how you view USC’s 7-6 finish last year depends: Do you see a glass half full or empty? Is losing five games by an average of 3.8 points a sign of how close the Trojans were to contending for a College Football Playoff spot – or was the fact that they couldn’t close a concerning sign of a lack of nerve, a deficit of focus, horrible habits?
Either way, let’s assume some lessons were learned heading into Year 2 in the Big Ten Conference – and the most prove-it of Year 4s under Coach Lincoln Riley.
Fortunately for him, it’s also Year 2 under D’Anton Lynn. The Trojans poached the rising star of a defensive coordinator from UCLA and he promptly rewarded them by taking their defense from terrible to respectable. USC held opponents to 24.1 points per game last year – 10-plus points fewer than the previous season.
So it’s tough to doubt the D – even if you have other doubts … about, say, starting quarterback Jayden Maiava.
He took over for former quarterback Miller Moss last season and threw for 1,201 yards and 11 touchdowns while rushing for four touchdowns in seven games, but Maiava also picked some poor moments to make poor decisions. Let’s assume lessons were learned.
Or so Riley told reporters at Big Ten Media Day in Las Vegas on Thursday: “Making sure that your mistakes, you know, don’t kill us. As a quarterback, a lot of times it’s, yes, you want to have the great plays, but how bad are your bad plays, right? If your bad plays are incompletions or throw-aways or occasionally taking a sack, you can still win with that.”
Limit the other more detrimental mental lapses, and Riley – who has coached three Heisman Trophy-winning QBs – says Maiava has “got a chance to be a really, really special player.” It will help that he will be playing catch with some special receivers, including sophomores Makai Lemon and Ja’Kobi Lane, two of the Trojans who stuck around while 21 others got up and switched teams while the transfer portal’s music was playing.
That portal also dropped a new quarterback in Westwood, you might have heard.
In the most 2025 of college sports stories, Nico Iamaleava transferred from Tennessee to UCLA after negotiations with the Volunteers on pay – ironic, just a little, no? – broke down.
In this new revenue-sharing pay-for-play era, Iamaleava wasn’t shy at Big Ten media day about his mindset entering his first and – he hopes – only season playing for DeShaun Foster and the Bruins: This is, ideally, a contract year before Iamaleava’s first NFL contract. So he’s going to give it the ol’ college try.
“I’m going to give my all to UCLA,” Iamaleava, a Long Beach native, told reporters in Las Vegas, where he answered months’ worth of pent-up questions from 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. “If I have the year I want, you know, I want to get out.”
In that case, UCLA will be happy to see him go. But for now, they were happy to see who decided to come play with Iamaleava, who threw for 2,616 yards and 19 touchdowns with five interceptions and ran for three touchdowns for a Tennessee team that went 10-3 and made the College Football Playoff.
Fourteen transfers followed the 6-foot-6 Iamaleava to UCLA, including Cal’s Jaivian Thomas, one of the top-ranked running backs in the portal, and then also four four-star high school linemen, bumping UCLA’s recruiting class up to No. 21 in the nation.
And don’t look now – the media contingent covering the Big Ten isn’t, mostly ignoring last year’s late-season surge, when the Bruins won four of their final six games en route to a 5-7 record – but UCLA is making strides toward what Foster promised last year, before taking over at his alma mater.
“You’re gonna see it, you’re gonna feel it,” Foster said during his introductory news conference on UCLA’s campus, where he cried and didn’t stutter. “We’re gonna get this Rose Bowl back to how it needs to be. We’re in L.A. We are UCLA! This is a real university. This isn’t a part-time school. We win banners in every sport. We can do it. I just got to get football back. I promise you, I’m the man to do this.”
On Thursday in Las Vegas, Foster – the best-dressed coach at the lectern if not the most natural orator – echoed those sentiments with a prepared statement that included this promise: “This year we’re ready to show the Big Ten what L.A. football looks like when it’s firing on all cylinders.”
Let’s see L.A.’s college football teams put their foot on the gas, let’s see them put some distance on whoever finishes in ninth and 15th in the 18-team Big Ten. Let’s see them wiser for last season’s stumbles, whether they came out of the gate late in games. Let’s see how two teams who have recently reemphasized local recruiting measure up in the rest of this coast-to-coast conference of theirs.
Let’s see whether those expectations and hope you’re harboring now pan out and pay off.
Let’s see.