Alex Grinch breaks down need for transfer portal production in Year 1

USC‘s Alex Grinch is approaching his first season with the Trojans as their defensive coordinator and safeties coach. There are a ton of new faces on the Trojan’s roster largely from the transfer portal, and Grinch broke down how he and head coach Lincoln Riley approached acquiring players these players to construct their roster.

“Number one you want to upgrade, I mean anytime you bring somebody in you look at the numbers, and this is the last year to the limit to 25. Now we didn’t have a big issue with that because we didn’t have the numbers from a high school standpoint. Either the first signing class or even into that second signing class, so the 25 wasn’t a huge concern but it’s something to be cognizant of. Anytime you bring anybody in, specifically as a transfer, you want to like the word upgrade, you don’t want to go same as, you don’t want to go equal then,” Grinch said.

Grinch is referring to the NCAA rule that currently allows 25 players to sign to a school per signing class, which has been eliminated for the next two upcoming seasons, which will allow teams to sign as many players possible up to the 85 scholarship limit for the roster.

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Some of the big name, transfer portal additions to USC like Caleb Williams and Jordan Addison have dominated the offseason headlines, but Grinch highlighted some of the struggles that came with building the current Trojans roster.

“But one of the things from a numbers standpoint that we found ourselves in this first year was just strictly based off on need, now that’s not a good situation to be in where you’re just literally trying to fill enough at a particular position so that you can have a spring practice. That happened too much in this first year, that’s just the reality of it, and moving forward we’ve got to make sure that’s obviously not the case,” Grinch said.

Despite these struggles, the Trojans are still holding themselves to a high standard and expect big things this season, as they continue to prepare themselves for their season opener and figure out who their best 11 will be on both sides of the ball this season.

“But elite’s the standard, USC says that that’s not our opinion, and so we got to make sure that as we evaluate these guys, that’s elite a number of different ways, from an academic, social standpoint, and obviously have the elite traits football-wise. Now the added piece of having the transfer aspect of things is hopefully you have a little bit more evidence as to them as 19, 20, and sometimes 21-year-olds, so there’s a lot that goes into it. Ultimately you’re trying to put the best 85 that you can find and then this year really it’s can we get 20 to 25 on defense that are suitable to help us compete this fall,” Grinch said.

It’s hard to anticipate what the Trojans will do this season under their first year of the Lincoln Riley regime, but it sounds like him and Grinch have things headed in the right direction in Los Angels.