LOS ANGELES — The game within the game started early on a Friday night in late October, Sierra Canyon High wide receiver Xavier Jordan and Gardena Serra cornerback Dakoda Fields chopping it up pregame, their paths having suddenly diverged.
They were boys since Pop Warner, playing on the same youth team. And both were headed to USC, highly rated local recruits who had committed to the Trojans in the summer.
Except Fields, in a surprise, announced in August that he had switched his commitment to Oregon.
“You flipped,” Fields recalled Jordan saying to him pregame.
“Go Ducks,” Fields responded.
They went at it over the next 48 minutes, Fields matched up one-on-one with Jordan and stifling him for much of the night. Until Jordan broke free for some room on a late fourth down, catching a pass before being tackled by Fields, looking down and flexing at the Serra senior as he got up.
“That’s my guy, but (expletive), he flipped,” Jordan said after a 35-28 Sierra Canyon win, “so I kinda took that personally.”
It wasn’t just the commitment flip. It was to whom.
An all-out dogfight has emerged between USC and Oregon on Friday night fields across the West Coast, an explosive, tug-of-war recruiting rivalry for top local talent that coaches and players in the mix are well aware of, growing in size and scope with both programs’ new regimes and upcoming moves to the Big Ten.
“They see everything each other’s doing,” said Sierra Canyon assistant Bruce Bible, who is well-connected in the Southern California recruiting world. “I mean, recruits going on trips, unofficial visits, official visits. And I don’t think the battle’s going to stop anytime soon.”
For years, USC had dominated the West Coast recruiting scene, particularly in California. But since Lincoln Riley and Dan Lanning took the reins of their respective USC and Oregon programs, there’s been a shift that reveals different approaches to program-building between longtime rivals.
The Southern California News Group compiled data on commitment decisions, from 247Sports, on every recruit across the western U.S. who has received an offer from both USC and Oregon since 2017. Before 2022, when Riley and Lanning were hired, the number of future Trojans outweighed Ducks 50 to 37.
Since then – including the class of 2024 – USC has signed 25. Oregon has signed 33.
The reasons for changing fortunes are complex and varied. Oregon’s aggressiveness in utilizing NIL, coaches say, has been a major factor. But USC, too, has become much more selective in local recruiting as it has built largely through the transfer portal – leaving the Ducks often more present across high school campuses, even in Southern California.
“You’re seeing this school that’s not in your backyard more than this school that is in their backyard,” Serra assistant coach Darrin Minor said. “So they’re making that effort to be in your face.”
Oregon’s ‘West Coast’ mentality
When Riley’s regime began at USC, the Trojans quickly established a strong presence at St. John Bosco High in Bellflower, the reigning national champions and one of the most successful football programs in the country.
USC went hard after Bosco defensive lineman Matayo Uiagalelei, who eventually signed with Oregon. The Trojans did get a commitment from Marcelles Williams, one of the top-ranked cornerbacks in the class of 2024, in the summer.
But since, as of late October, Negro said he hadn’t seen a USC recruiter on campus once.
“Oregon is just much – and other programs across the country – are just so much more aggressive in coming after our kids than they have been,” Negro said of USC, adding you could hardly criticize someone who has been as successful as Riley.
USC has had a string of local wins in recent weeks, getting commitments from 2024 Los Alamitos cornerback Isaiah Rubin and 2026 Loyola cornerback Brandon Lockhart. But Negro’s comments, on paper, hold true wider than Bosco; a pipeline from local power Mater Dei appears to have dried up, and just five of USC’s commits in the class of 2024 come from California. Oregon, by comparison, has nine.
That’s intentional, on USC’s part, to some degree. In late October, when asked about the approach to local recruiting, Riley said upon his first evaluation of the program, “there were a lot of players from the state of California who should not be on the USC roster.”
“Hiding behind the curtain of, ‘Well, at least we’re recruiting California kids,’ I don’t think does the program any good,” Riley said. “It’s – we want to get California kids, we want to get local kids, we want them to be the right kids.”
It’s an interesting contrast to Oregon’s philosophy in program-building – take comments to the SCNG from Pat Biondo, the Ducks’ football director of recruiting strategy.
“The biggest thing for us, in recruiting, is we want to keep the best guys on the West Coast,” Biondo said.
When their microscopes do align – and they do frequently – coaches and players in Southern California indicate Oregon is often more pushy in pursuing targets. Take St. John Bosco, a school ripe with defensive talent, where Negro says he’s in contact with Lanning and defensive coordinator Tosh Lupoi “weekly,” wooing Uiagalelei to the Ducks with now-fulfilled promises of playing immediately.
On Feb. 1, Gardena Serra cornerback Rodrick Pleasant tugged on an Oregon hat inside Serra’s gym, announcing a commitment that was a “shock to everybody,” according to assistant coach Minor.
Pleasant had been leaning toward USC, Minor said; what ultimately swayed the dual-sport prospect was a relentless and coordinated push from Oregon’s football and track departments. A little over a month later, Pleasant was featured on a billboard in Times Square in Nike gear.
It was the same concept of constant follow-up, constant love shown, that led Fields to flip, Minor said. Always there. Always visible.
“You don’t necessarily have to have a roster full of California kids,” Negro said, when asked about Riley’s comments, “but you better get the elite ones.”
“And I don’t think that that’s what they’re doing a very good job of right now.”
NIL affecting recruiting
Two years into the legalization of NIL monetization in collegiate athletics, discussion of its usage in local high school recruiting is still strangely taboo. Local coaches swear, widely, that Athlete X wasn’t wooed to a commitment by money or endorsement deals; Riley himself, even, expressed the desire for more transparency in the NIL space.
“We’re stuck somewhere right now in between kind of half-professional, half-amateur right now,” the USC coach said in late August.
And it’s hard to pin down USC’s exact approach to utilizing donor money in pitches to recruits. It’s less hard to pin down Oregon’s.
Sam Gallegos, the father of 2024 Sierra Canyon safety Marquis Gallegos, said every school in his son’s recruitment, including USC and Oregon, promised him a minimum of $75,000 if he signed. In general, according to coaches in Southern California with firsthand knowledge of recruitment, Oregon is much more up front with recruits in monetary compensation. It was the last part of USC’s pitch to Marquis, Gallegos said, and his son eventually chose the Trojans.
One source familiar with the situation told the SCNG that big-time freshman recruits – such as wide receivers Zachariah Branch and Duce Robinson – are “highly compensated” through NIL collectives that support USC student-athletes. But that same source told the SCNG that Oregon was simply spending more money in the NIL space than USC.
“Far as ’SC, they talk about it if you really break it up and kinda break it down, but there’s no for-sure number for everybody,” Minor, the Serra assistant, said in regards to NIL discussions with prospective recruits. “Oregon can literally tell you somewhat of what it’s going to be, and you know what to expect. You don’t fully know what to expect at ’SC.”
The future of USC’s NIL approach, however, will likely hinge on searching for sponsorship deals rather than tossing donor money at recruits. Major headway is already being made on that front: Another source told the SCNG that the Conquest Collective, a marketing agency supporting USC athletes, is finalizing a football program-wide deal with a major company that would provide players with a flat payment and percentage of back-end profits of merchandising revenue.
And Riley said new USC athletic director Jen Cohen and her team have been “really impactful” on the NIL front, with a clear vision to unify university-supporting collectives.
“Our goal is to be at the forefront of it,” Riley said, “and we have the firepower here to be at the absolute forefront of it.”
Two competing approaches, two programs casting different nets in this West Coast recruiting war, will collide Saturday night in Eugene in a present-day battle for a spot in the Pac-12 championship game.
And with Oregon following USC to the Big Ten, the jockeying for position will only intensify, both in the short- and long-term.
“It’s like, I don’t know who first,” Jordan, the Sierra Canyon star, said of the local recruiting rivalry. “But I know it’s Oregon and ’SC.”
