USC’s decision to keep Clay Helton as head coach is looking worse and worse, especially as rivals are assessing the Trojan recruiting class.
Based on 247 Sports’ recruiting rankings, USC’s 2020 recruiting class is worst in the Pac-12 and 79th best in the nation, wedged between the likes of Bowling Green and Louisiana.
So how bad is it? According to FOX Sports’ well-connected insider Bruce Feldman, rival Pac-12 coaches have said USC’s recruiting class is at a Mountain West level.
“Talking to coaches in the Pac-12, seeing a lot of the recruits they’ve signed – at least in the early signing period – people feel like these are Mountain West caliber players,” Feldman said, as transcribed by Alek Arend of The Spun. “It’s one thing if you sign this kind of class at Washington State or Oregon State. But USC? There’s a lot of big time kids – this was a good crop of players, by and large, in the state of California, especially in Southern California. And they went other places. A lot of them went to Oregon. The best ones went to Oregon. They went outside the conference.”
That’s an absolutely brutal assessment of a school that was once one of the biggest recruiting powerhouses in football. USC used to own Los Angeles recruiting, but that’s not the case anymore. When even former USC players are calling out the team’s recruiting failures, it reflects poorly on Helton, who was already unpopular with fans.
