Welcome to the Audible presented by Trader Joe's. I'm Stuart Mandel, joined as always by Bruce Feldman.

All right, Stu, and now we're pleased to be joined by our guest. He's our colleague, Antonio Morales, who does a terrific job covering USC, but like a lot of our

team B-writers does a really good job of branching out.

And so Antonio, a couple of weeks ago, had a survey of a bunch of coaches and personnel people

about the portal.

He worked on it with Sam Con.

We'll get into that and some of their findings and the opinions that they raked in.

But as we said, you cover USC and Lincoln Riley is an extremely polarizing topic.

He was when he was kind of closer to the top of college football when he came to

USC in his first year because he left Oklahoma in an interesting way. And he has really struggled

mightily the last two years. As we're having you on this, Antonio, it's interesting because

they're coming off of a second consecutive

dud's season. He has a massive buyout. The AD who is now his boss is not the AD who hired him.

It's an interesting dynamic there. And they now have the number one ranked recruiting class in the

country. For a program that has seemingly no momentum, it's a really interesting time there.

On top of it, he's the head coach of a program that was for a Blue Blood and a prominent program

was always extremely media friendly and visible.

Practices were open, especially you know P. Carroll days. And Lincoln, his regime, has shuttered it largely to the dismay of a lot of, you know,

people who want to see what's going on with the USC. And it's in a market where a lot of people

have other, it's not like you're in oklahoma where

everything is oh you football u football is not that with so many other options so with that as a

backdrop Antonio what do you think if you're a USC fan is a reason why this time maybe it feels like

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