The Trojans have their quarterback of the future. But it was not without theatrics, as always seems to be the case with USC football.

Five-star recruit Husan Longstreet committed to the Trojans (5-5, 3-5 Big Ten) over the weekend after their 28-20 win over Nebraska (5-5, 2-4) this past Saturday. That was only after five-star quarterback Julian Lewis — the supposed cornerstone of USC’s 2025 recruiting class — decommitted minutes before Longstreet’s announcement.

Head Coach Lincoln Riley needs to learn from this situation if he ever wants to have recruiting success as the Trojans’ coach. Longstreet is a product local to southern California, prepping at Centennial High School in Corona.

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Lewis is the absolute opposite, prepping all the way in Carrollton, Ga. Even though Lewis verbally pledged to the Trojans back in August 2023, he has been flirting with the likes of Colorado (8-2, 6-1 Big 12), Indiana (10-0, 7-0 Big Ten) and Georgia (8-2, 6-2 SEC) for months.

Longstreet himself was committed to Texas A&M (8-2, 5-1 SEC) before flipping to USC, but the quarterback carousel shows how Riley and his coaching staff should recruit in the future.

To Riley’s credit, he likely has the best track record of any college coach in terms of quarterback play, producing three Heisman Trophy winners in his time as a head coach. His history means that Riley should be able to pluck the best quarterbacks in each recruiting class from across the country to join his team.

For the entire cycle until the most recent rankings updates, Lewis was the higher-ranked prospect than Longstreet. It seems that the Trojans would want to go for the best recruits, no matter where they are across the country. But it’s more complicated than that.

As every college student knows, there’s more to a college decision than just the best education or, in this case, playing for the best quarterback coach in the country. Proximity to home, overall location, team facilities and a winning culture are just a few of the factors that might affect a recruit’s college choice.

So, in this day and age of recruiting, USC needs to try to remove any potential negative factor that will hurt the Trojans’ chances of securing a commitment. In this case, it’s proximity to home.

USC has valiantly tried to recruit from across the country, but it’s been a mixed bag of success. In the 2025 cycle, the Trojans secured the verbal pledges of five top-60 recruits from SEC country between Georgia, Alabama and Florida. All five of them have since decommitted.

Riley and company need to be nationally relevant for multiple years before they can even try to sniff the likes of Georgia and Florida’s recruiting hotbeds. For now, USC can shift its focus to another scorching hot pool of high school talent in its own backyard.

Longstreet is a prime example of this, even though he was the second choice. It was as if the Trojans asked Lewis to prom and he said yes but kept his options open. Longstreet, USC’s “boy next door” for the entirety of his life, found his own prom date in Texas A&M. The Trojans got upset that Lewis was taking calls from other schools and then started to court Longstreet, who ended up as the more attractive option anyway.

All it took was for Lewis to break up with USC for Longstreet to ditch Texas A&M and commit to the Trojans, likely a sign he wanted to stay close to home all along.

Frankly, the South does have the best high school talent in the country. Twenty-five of the nation’s 33 five-star recruits this year are from Texas, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana or Mississippi. But California’s talent should not be discounted. Nine of the top-20 recruits from California in this cycle are committed to SEC schools, showing how strong the talent is here if the likes of Alabama and Texas are taking time away from recruiting in their backyards to court these athletes.

So why is USC not putting in that much effort with highly talented players who might want to stay home? Some of the best Trojan recruiting classes have been entirely dependent on California talent.

Back in the 2011 recruiting cycle, USC brought home the No. 3 class in the country. That group’s eight highest-rated players all went to high school in California. While the Trojans had an easier time recruiting back then, still riding the wave of back-to-back national championships between 2003-04, it shows that the best USC teams recruit from California.

The Trojans will have a tough time recruiting in SEC country when they sit at 5-5, and current SEC teams have won 14 of the last 19 national championships since USC won its last.

As such, USC should entirely focus its efforts on a state that has 18 of the top-200 players across the country. While 9% might seem low, one state having that much talent is impressive, especially considering the lack of recruiting competition. There are no ranked college teams in California in the most recent College Football Playoff rankings and only two ranked teams, No. 1 Oregon (11-0, 8-0) and No. 24 UNLV (8-2, 4-1 Mountain West), in states bordering California.

Of note, despite the lack of top-tier teams on the West Coast who can challenge USC’s recruiting efforts compared to the South, the Trojans only have the commitments of two of those 18 players in the state — Longstreet and four-star linebacker Matai Tagoa’i.

Riley needs to stop fighting a losing battle and reinvest his time in the areas close to home, which just happens to have some of the best talent in the country.

Thomas Johnson is a senior writing about USC’s arrival to a new conference and all of the implications surrounding the entrance in his column, “Big Ten Bites,” which runs every other Wednesday.