USC is heading in the right direction, regardless of what comes of 2025

Expectations can be a tricky thing to navigate. When discussing the upcoming USC season, opinions vary as to how well the Trojans will do in 2025. The most optimistic voices have coach Lincoln Riley's team as a College Football Playoff dark horse. Others in the fan base believe that there will be a struggle to have a winning year.

In truth, a lot unfolds throughout the course of the fall for each program. Aspects that become glaringly obvious are not even being thought of by those in the building, let alone the fans at the moment. Football is a dynamic three-phase sport.

It is anyone's guess as to how anyone will actually look once the live snaps begin. Yes, when looking at the peak years of Coach Nick Saban's Alabama, for his example, there were high preseason expectations, and most had them safely penciled in as the champion for a reason. Even then, when looking back, a lot still had to benefit the Crimson Tide and go their way in order for Alabama to achieve the success that they did at the time.

 The same principle holds true for USC and any other current team. A blown 4th-and-inches call or phantom penalty, one or the other, can drastically alter a game and, as a consequence, change the trajectory of a season. Looking to project forward now can be fun and is part of the nature of the fans experience during the summer months, particularly with the season feeling tantalizingly close to beginning.

Mistakes will happen. How someone responds or what a team does to minimize the effect or make up for something that goes against the original game plan those are examples of things that are completely unknown that end up having massive implications throughout the course of a team sport.
Granted, to an extent, all factors tend to even each other out. 'You are what your record shows' can be true to a degree. What that fails to encapsulate is how a team arrived at its final record.

More accurately, when matched up against good teams, only looking at wins and losses fails to take into account how competitive the matchup truly was and if a team was only a play or two away from flipping the result.

Contextualizing USC expectations for 2025

There was a lot to look forward to about this USC team. Between the returners and new players, many are rightly excited to see how the Trojans end up doing this year.

When the games actually start, a lot more will be found out regarding the off-season progress under coach Riley. Maybe this team is ready to win a lot of games now; maybe it isn't. After everything the program has been through since coach Pete Carroll was on the sidelines, this USC team needs patience from the fan base. The Trojans are building the program the right way.