LOS ANGELES — The image of a triumphant Freddie Freeman from the night of Oct. 25, 2024 — midstroll, face stoic, right hand pointed upward — has been tattooed on body parts all over L.A. County. Freeman himself has signed four of them, three on shins and one on an arm. He used to go practically anywhere in Southern California without getting recognized, even in the areas where he grew up. Now that never happens. Fans approach him everywhere, many recounting precisely where they were when he hit the walk-off grand slam in Game 1 of the World Series that helped propel the Los Angeles Dodgers to a championship. Often they just say, Thank you.

“I’m happy about it,” Freeman said. “It means something good happened, right? You don’t try and hope for that moment to happen; it just kind of comes to you, and you hope that you’re ready for the moment. There’s so many times when I failed, and no one really remembers the failures.”

Freeman’s home run, the first of four in a World Series that saw him produce a 1.364 OPS and win MVP honors, has been depicted on countless bobbleheads, T-shirts and paintings. It has aired on Dodger Stadium’s videoboard before every home game and might continue being played there forever, much like Kirk Gibson’s heroics from 36 years earlier.

Freeman is hitting better than he ever has in his age-35 season, even while battling the same ankle injury that plagued him in October. Somehow, he has been more productive in his 30s than he was in his 20s. Reaching 3,000 hits, an almost unimaginable feat during such a pitcher-dominant era, remains a distinct possibility. The Hall of Fame is a near certainty. But one swing on one night will in some ways outshine anything Freeman ever accomplishes, a reality emphasized by the Yankees’ return to Dodger Stadium this weekend.

“And that’s OK,” Freeman said. “Something great happened for us to win a World Series, and I loved every second of it.”

Freeman is as stringent about his routine as any athlete, but he’s also sentimental. And while several of his teammates spoke earlier this year about the importance of moving on in hopes of avoiding a letdown, Freeman wondered why it couldn’t be both. In his mind, one can savor an accomplishment while preparing for another. He found himself wanting to marinate in that moment, largely because he has played long enough to appreciate its singularity.

One interaction with a fan, lasting all of three minutes, reinforced that.

Freeman was among a group of Dodgers players at a Jan. 31 luncheon for those impacted by the L.A. wildfires; it was part of the team’s annual community tour. There, a man recounted how he gave up drinking on the night of Freeman’s home run. Freeman can recall every detail from that conversation. The fan sat in the right-field section and vowed to remain sober in order to be more present for his two sons. Freeman’s home run ball sailed over their heads, and all his sons wanted to do was play baseball the next morning. Typically, the man told Freeman, he’d be too hungover to join them. This time he had the energy to play all day. The fan said he hadn’t touched alcohol since.

“Just chills,” Freeman said while relaying that story. “And you think about how not just baseball but sports can impact people’s lives in such a positive way that to be able to be part of something like that is a pretty special thing. I love this game. This game helped me get through hard times when I lost my mom and stuff like that; me and my dad would be out here playing baseball, doing things.

“It helps. And when you come full circle 25 years later, when you’re 35 and you create a moment for someone — that’s what this is all about for me. I love winning and championships, but to know that I was able to impact someone’s life in such a positive way — I still don’t know if I can grasp it.”

When Freeman crossed home plate, the first thing he did was dart toward his father, Fred, and high-five him through the netting behind home plate. Freeman’s mother died due to melanoma when he was 10. But Fred had also lost his wife. His entire life was turned upside down. Still, he continued to show up for his children. Baseball became their therapy. That fan’s story made Freeman think about how those two boys could be impacted by their dad showing up for them, too, and how one moment can have such a far-reaching impact.

“Sports is cool, man,” Freeman said, shaking his head. “Like, it can do so many good things for so many people.”

Freeman had struggled during the first three weeks of last postseason while playing through the right ankle injury he suffered on Sept. 26, the night the Dodgers clinched a first-round bye, and the rib injury he sustained a week later. Near the end of the National League Championship Series, he struggled to hold his front side in the batter’s box. Any attempt to put force on the ground caused Freeman’s foot to roll over. As it turned out, a Game 5 loss to the New York Mets was a godsend.

MLB had implemented a tweak in its postseason schedule that allowed the World Series to begin early if both leagues concluded their championship series in five games or fewer. The Yankees complied, dispatching the Cleveland Guardians in Game 5. But the Dodgers lost to the Mets, extending the series to a sixth game.

Said Freeman: “It changed everything for me.”

Instead of getting only three days off before the World Series, Freeman sat for Game 6, watched the Dodgers bullpen their way to a pennant, and by the time the Yankees arrived at Dodger Stadium for Game 1, he had received six full days of rest. He was suddenly a more complete version of himself, mobile enough to leg out a first-inning triple and flexible enough to turn on Nestor Cortes‘ 10th-inning fastball, sending it 413 feet to deliver one of the most iconic moments in postseason history. The Dodgers won the series in five.

“So many little things,” Freeman said, “and it could’ve gone so many different ways.”

Freeman felt good enough after the World Series to assume rest alone would heal his ankle. Four weeks later, he could barely walk. Imaging revealed he had torn four ligaments. Surgery was required. Freeman spent the next four months rehabbing methodically, then slipped in his shower on March 30, reaggravating his ankle and prompting a short stint on the injured list.

In his first 11 games back, Freeman batted just .250. His hips were opening too early and his swing wasn’t staying in the strike zone long enough, the continuation of a mechanical issue he spent most of the previous year working through. But a sixth-inning, opposite-field single against Paul Skenes on April 25 unlocked a feeling Freeman had been searching for. Since then, he is slashing .412/.474/.647 in 31 games. His .368 batting average and 1.065 OPS this season rank higher than everyone not named Aaron Judge. His 186 weighted runs created plus is tied for his career best, set during the COVID-19-shortened season, when he was named NL MVP.

A Dodgers team that was expected by many to challenge the regular-season wins record currently has 14 pitchers on the injured list and has had to scrap just to maintain a slight edge over the San Diego Padres and San Francisco Giants in the NL West, while sitting at 35-22. Through that, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts believes Freeman has unlocked another level of intensity.

“He’s dialed in,” Roberts said. “It’s not as lax intensity as he typically is; it’s more of an edgy intensity.”

Daily treatment on Freeman’s right ankle has been reduced from as many as four hours last October to as little as 40 minutes. It feels significantly better, but trainers have told him it won’t be fully right until some time around the All-Star break. Freeman still wears heel lifts in his cleats to alleviate some of the discomfort. His first few steps in the morning still come with agonizing pain. The Dodgers won’t let him steal bases, even when the time is on his side, a restriction that gnaws at him. But the production continues.

Freeman is on pace for 7.1 FanGraphs wins above replacement this season, which would represent the second-highest total of his career. If he gets there, he’ll rank seventh among first basemen in fWAR compiled between ages 31 and 35, behind only Roger Connor, Willie Stargell, Bill Terry, Mark McGwire, Stan Musial and Lou Gehrig. If he accumulates just 75 more hits, a near certainty if he avoids prolonged injury, he will have compiled more than 2,400 by season’s end, giving him a fighting chance at 3,000 in the back half of his 30s.

In his 20s, Freeman slashed .293/.379/.504. In his 30s, he has upped that to .317/.405/.533. These days, Freeman has an added incentive to remain productive:

He wants all those tattoos of his home run to hold up.

“I need to stay good,” Freeman said, “so that hopefully they still appreciate those in 30 years.”

Leave it to college football to take the silliest, most circuitous possible route to the easiest, most logical answer.

Though nothing’s official and things could take further silly turns, a read of recent tea leaves gives the impression that those in charge of how the College Football Playoff will look in 2026 and beyond are homing in on a straightforward, 16-team tournament with five guaranteed spots for conference champions and 11 at-large bids. After months of debates about different bracket structures and conferences getting multiple automatic bids, the conversation seems to have returned to a clean and easy bracket.

We’re going to pretend this means people are listening to me. When I wrote about this debate in March, I recommended skipping expansion to 14 teams and moving to 16, and I mocked the idea of multiple autobids. Granted, I also recommended putting six conference champions in the field and putting quarterfinal games in home stadiums, not just first-round games. I won’t hold my breath on those ideas (especially the former), but that’s still a pretty good batting average.

After a week of posturing from power conference leaders, let’s keep the conversation going. Here are some thoughts about what we’ve learned this week and the debates still to come

Moving to nine conference games might cost the SEC one to two playoff teams per year

SEC commissioner Greg Sankey talked a lot this week. He went on “The Paul Finebaum Show.” He talked about a scheduling partnership with the Big Ten. He increased the fines for field rushing. He talked about which playoff games should or will be on home campuses. He talked about how long this formatting process takes. He scoffed at being told to serve the good of the game. And he spent a long time telling everyone how hard the SEC’s schedules are:

On Thursday afternoon, the SEC provided members of the media with a six-page packet that included color-coded charts using multiple metrics to illustrate the league’s dominant schedule strength. Sankey said the task for determining the CFP’s strength of schedule component is striking a balance “between human and machine,” referring to the old BCS computer formula. … [The packet] included ESPN’s Strength of Record, Bill Connelly’s SP+, Kenneth Massey’s metric, ESPN’s Football Power Index and ESPN’s Strength of Schedule metric.

Sankey seemed to have two primary goals for bringing up strength of schedule. For starters, it seemed like he wanted to remind everyone that Alabama and its 9-3 record didn’t get into last year’s 12-team CFP despite strength-of-schedule numbers quite a bit stronger than those of higher ranked teams such as SMU (which had gone 11-2), Boise State (12-1) and Indiana (11-1). He said that decision left him with critical questions about the committee and its process.

“I do think there’s a need for change,” Sankey said of the ranking protocol Thursday at the conclusion of his league’s spring meetings. “… How do you make those decisions? It’s hard, and we trust the committee to do that, and I respect the people in there, so this isn’t a criticism of the people. This is wanting to understand the decisions. We have to have better clarity on the criteria that inform those decisions.”

Now, all the strength-of-schedule advantages in the world didn’t stop Alabama from losing to 6-6 Vanderbilt and 6-6 Oklahoma. In the latter game, Alabama couldn’t have looked less playoff-worthy, losing 24-3 to the Sooners. Maybe the Tide would have gotten in with a formula approach, but they showed no indication that they could make a playoff run at the end of the season. Plus, we know that the playoff committee took Alabama’s strength of schedule into account because it ranked the Tide ahead of 11-2 Arizona State, 10-2 Miami and 10-2 BYU, among others, despite how they looked at the end of the regular season. If Bama had lost to only one of Vandy or Oklahoma, the Tide would have almost certainly been in the field of 12. And they’d have definitely been in a field of 16 regardless, along with two other three-loss SEC teams (Ole Miss and South Carolina).

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Greg Sankey discusses the hottest topics from the SEC spring meetings

Commissioner Sankey joins The Paul Finebaum Show to detail the conversations around possible CFP changes and conference schedules going forward.

Also, Sankey didn’t mention that the committee placed a one-loss Alabama team ahead of an unbeaten Florida State team in the CFP rankings just one year earlier. If we want to talk about a formula, let’s talk about a formula. But the SEC has been treated with extreme kindness by the committee on average.

(For the record, I’m all for a formula-based rankings system. I put out a BCS-like formula ranking in the home stretch of each season, and there’s value in the approach. People convinced themselves that they hated the BCS formula, but I will forever insist that the main reason they hated the formula wasn’t the formula — it was that the BCS selected only two teams to play for the title. With a lot more teams to choose now, a formula approach would work quite well.)

Beyond the attempts to work the referees, however, Sankey also discussed schedule strength as it pertained to the ongoing conversation about the length of the SEC’s conference schedules. The SEC plays eight-game conference schedules, while the other primary power conference, the Big Ten, plays nine-game schedules. Despite this difference, the metrics cited by the SEC above (including, yes, my SP+ rankings) are a pretty stark reminder that, between the SEC typically having far fewer easy matchups than the Big Ten and a solid rotation of annual out-of-conference rivalry games played by SEC teams against ACC programs — Florida against Florida State, South Carolina against Clemson, etc. — the average SEC schedule is already a decent amount tougher than the average Big Ten schedule. Using my recent post-spring SP+ projections as a guide, SEC teams project to have 13 of the 15 hardest schedules in the country despite eight-game conference slates.

Since Sankey serves at the discretion of SEC presidents and, to a degree, athletic directors, it made sense that Sankey wanted to push back on the mounting pressure to move to nine games.

“If we’re not confident that the decision-making about who gets in and why and what are the metrics around it, it’s going to be really hard for some of my colleagues to get to the nine games,” Texas A&M athletics director Trev Alberts said this week.

Why make your schedules harder if it will cost your conference playoff bids, right?

There are plenty of valid reasons for moving to nine games regardless of what it does to playoff status. For starters, it will likely increase the value of the SEC’s media rights contract, giving the league even more of a war chest. It would make teams’ home schedules even more exciting and, potentially, expensive. And most importantly, it would make the 16-team conference feel like an actual conference: With a nine-game schedule, you can play every team twice in four years. With eight-game schedules, those rotations take a lot longer. (Yes, this is being written by a Mizzou guy who’s bitter that LSU fans, with their tailgating prowess, have had a reason to come to Columbia only once in Mizzou’s 13 SEC seasons.)

Because we’re using numbers to prove that SEC schedules are already difficult, let’s use numbers to ask a different question: How much more difficult would nine-game SEC schedules be?

To answer this question, I did what I do: I ran a simulation. I created four years’ worth of nine-game SEC schedules based around the super-clean, super-easy idea of permanent conference rivalries: You assign every team three permanent, annual opponents, and they play six other opponents home-and-away over two years, then the other six over the next two. Voila, you’ve visited every stadium in your conference and hosted every conference mate at least once every four years. I’ve been floored that other huge conferences such as the Big Ten and Big 12 haven’t leaned further into the permanent rivals concept — the 16-team Big 12 isn’t making Farmageddon (Kansas State-Iowa State) an annual game, and the 18-team Big Ten didn’t set up annual games between all of its four new Western teams. Regardless, I set up permanent rivals for each SEC team.

• Alabama: Auburn, LSU, Tennessee

• Arkansas: Missouri, Texas, Texas A&M

• Auburn: Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi State

• Florida: Georgia, Kentucky, South Carolina

• Georgia: Auburn, Florida, South Carolina

• Kentucky: Florida, Tennessee, Vanderbilt

• LSU: Alabama, Mississippi State, Ole Miss

• Mississippi State: Auburn, LSU, Ole Miss

• Missouri: Arkansas, Oklahoma, South Carolina

• Oklahoma: Missouri, Texas, Texas A&M

• Ole Miss: LSU, Mississippi State, Vanderbilt

• South Carolina: Florida, Georgia, Missouri

• Tennessee: Alabama, Kentucky, Vanderbilt

• Texas: Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas A&M

• Texas A&M: Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas

• Vanderbilt: Kentucky, Ole Miss, Tennessee

These pairings preserve all but one of the series that have been played 90-plus times (Alabama-Mississippi State is the one I couldn’t squeeze in, in part because MSU has four such series). They reconnect former Big 8, Big 12 and/or SWC rivalries such as Oklahoma-Missouri and Texas-Arkansas, but they don’t go too far in that regard — at this point, Missouri has played South Carolina as conference mates as many times as Texas A&M (13) and more than Texas (nine), and the teams from the two Columbias have played some strange and memorable battles already.

There’s obviously a pretty big difference in quality between, say, Auburn’s or LSU’s annual opponents versus that of Kentucky or Ole Miss. But remember: Six of a team’s nine conference games come from the rest of the pool. Over a four-year rotation, Auburn’s schedules are only a smidgen harder than Ole Miss’ on average.

A full nine-game Auburn schedule might look like this: Alabama, at Georgia, Mississippi State, at Oklahoma, South Carolina, at Ole Miss, Tennessee, at Vanderbilt, Texas A&M. Meanwhile, an Ole Miss schedule might look like this (common opponents in bold): at LSU, Vanderbilt, at Mississippi State, Arkansas, at Kentucky, Auburn, at Missouri, Georgia, at Oklahoma. One plays Alabama, the other plays LSU. One plays Kentucky, the other plays South Carolina. Over time, the schedule strengths will be pretty close.

Using existing nonconference games as much as possible (with a few necessary tweaks), here’s what the 2026 schedule might look like with nine total conference games and a 3+6 approach.

Because you’ve got some teams now playing five conference road games, it will be difficult to avoid handing teams some pretty rough patches — Alabama and Missouri playing four road games in five weeks late in the season, for example, or Kentucky starting with back-to-back conference road games. But it’s hard not to notice how every week is pretty loaded. Some hypothetical 2026 headliners:

• Week 1: Georgia at Ole Miss, Clemson at LSU, Miami at South Carolina, Texas A&M at Tennessee

• Week 2: Ohio State at Texas, Oklahoma at Michigan, Missouri at Kansas, Kentucky at LSU

• Week 3: Florida State at Alabama, Oklahoma at Texas A&M, South Carolina at Auburn, Florida at Kentucky

• Week 4: Tennessee at Georgia, Alabama at Florida, Arkansas vs. Texas A&M, LSU at South Carolina, Illinois at Missouri*

• Week 5: Georgia at Alabama, Auburn at Oklahoma, Florida at Texas, Texas A&M at South Carolina, Ole Miss at Missouri

• Week 6: Oklahoma vs. Texas, Tennessee at Auburn, Missouri at Georgia, South Carolina at Florida

• Week 7: Tennessee at Alabama, LSU at Texas, Auburn at Ole Miss, Oklahoma at Arkansas, Georgia at South Carolina

• Week 8: Arkansas at Ole Miss, Missouri at South Carolina, Oklahoma at Kentucky

• Week 9: Alabama at Texas, Georgia vs. Florida, Ole Miss at LSU, Missouri at Texas A&M

• Week 10: Alabama at LSU, Texas A&M at Auburn, Ole Miss at Oklahoma, Texas at Missouri

• Week 11: Auburn at Georgia, Texas at Arkansas, Florida at Texas A&M, Missouri at Tennessee

• Week 12: LSU at Florida, Georgia at Texas A&M, Missouri at Oklahoma, Alabama at South Carolina

• Week 13: The typical loaded rivalry week

(* Missouri is somehow scheduled to play at Illinois and Kansas in 2026, but because the Tigers drew a slate with five conference road games, I flipped the Illinois game out of pure convenience.)

Obviously, the real-life 2026 SEC slate will also feature a lot of these big-time games, but aside from a relatively paltry Week 8, every week has some huge, TV-friendly brand matchups. That’s an utterly loaded schedule.

It’s also a schedule that will, as athletic directors will surely notice, hand quite a few losses to good teams.

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Paul Finebaum supports CFP moving to straight seeding in 2025

Paul Finebaum is on board with the College Football Playoff shifting to a straight seeding model starting this season.

Though I shared hypothetical 2026 schedules above, I wanted to use SP+ projections to look at a full four-year rotation and compare what it would produce from a wins-and-losses standpoint to what the current eight-game slate produces.

For the league’s elite teams, moving to nine games won’t make much of a difference. For instance, with its current schedule, SP+ projects Georgia to win 9.8 games on average, with an 84.9% chance of going at least 9-3 (the hypothetical cutoff line for SEC teams hoping to get into the field). But with an abridged, three-game nonconference schedule — for the most part, I shrank nonconference schedules by getting rid of teams’ second games against Group of 5 teams and leaving one game against a power-conference opponent, one against a G5 team and one against an FCS team — Georgia averages 9.7 wins over four simulated seasons, with a 79.6% chance of reaching 9-3 or better on average. There’s a bit less margin for error, but well-projected teams like Georgia will be in good shape, regardless.

For the league’s light heavyweights, however, things get trickier. Florida has a 43.7% chance of finishing 9-3 or better in 2025, but in a nine-SEC-games universe, that drops to 19.6%. Four others see their odds drop by at least 10%, and current long shots like Vanderbilt (10.2% chance of going 9-3 in 2025) see their odds almost completely vanish (0.1%).

Overall, an average of 6.2 SEC teams are projected to go 9-3 or better in 2025. In a nine-game universe, that average shrinks to 4.7. With a 16-team field, you could say that the league would go from expecting around six teams in the field to having four or five teams safely in and campaigning for some 8-4 teams. Meanwhile, the league would also go from an average of 13.4 bowl-eligible teams to just 11.4.

That’s not an insignificant change. There would be plenty of cases where an 8-4 team with an off-the-charts strength of schedule would also be in good shape, but the professed risk is real. Of course, that’s what the money’s for. Media rights revenue would probably rise with expanded conference schedules; plus, the SEC and Big Ten are already guaranteed a huge portion of future CFP money anyway, so if they lose a playoff team here or there, it’s only going to hurt so much. Still, it’s easy to see why SEC ADs and coaches, whose jobs (and, potentially, bonuses) might be dictated by CFP bids, might balk at making tough schedules tougher.

The SEC and Big Ten championship games are being rendered moot

Among the main reasons the Big Ten, in particular, was interested in a selection process that featured multiple autobids (a rumored four each for the Big Ten and SEC) were that it would allow the two conferences — plus, perhaps, the ACC and Big 12, which were likely to receive two guaranteed bids each in such a structure — to redefine Championship Weekend.

The Big Ten and SEC championship games provided little-to-no positive impact for their winners last year: Oregon beat Penn State in the Big Ten championship to earn a first-round playoff bye but drew a smoking hot Ohio State in the quarterfinals and lost, and Georgia beat Texas in the SEC championship but lost quarterback Carson Beck to injury and handed Gunner Stockton his first career start in a quarterfinal loss to Notre Dame. (Plus, there were almost no negative repercussions for losing these games. Penn State and Texas each dropped only one spot in the rankings, and when SMU lost to lower-ranked Clemson in the ACC championship game, the Mustangs fell only from eighth to 10th and still got in.) With autobids, you could create multiple play-in games and produce a new spectacle while avoiding handing extra injury risk to just your top two teams.

There’s logic in that, even if I didn’t think it outweighed the negatives of multiple autobids — that they would make the entire playoff look like a Big Ten-SEC invitational, render large portions of the regular season moot (nonconference games would have almost no impact on playoff bids, and if a No. 6 seed with an 8-4 record can steal an 11-1 No. 3 seed’s playoff bid, then what’s the point of any of this?) and sure looked like they were primarily designed to rake in extra television dough.

Recent brainstorming sessions reportedly produced ideas such as giving SEC and Big Ten champions a double-bye in a 16-team bracket, with a first round consisting of play-in games for the lowest-ranked of the 16 teams, but that ruins the point of a clean, easy 16-team playoff. But with a plain 16-teamer, the impact of the SEC and Big Ten championships will be the difference between getting a No. 1 and No. 4 seed. That doesn’t counter the injury risk.

Conference championships are valuable enough that I doubt conferences will willingly get rid of them. But they feel like a hindrance to the current process, and I wonder how conference leaders will square that circle. I have one idea, though, and it comes from the 2020 COVID season.

When the Big Ten initially announced it was returning to action that fall, it created an abbreviated eight-game slate for each team, followed by a championship weekend that was intended to feature extra cross-division games for each team across the East and West divisions — No. 2 East vs. No. 2 West, No. 3 vs. No. 3, etc. Granted, things got messy because of positive COVID tests and resulting cancellations, but the Big Ten still featured four games on championship weekend.

Maybe there’s something to the idea of playing a full slate of championship week games, even if they aren’t playoff play-in games? Maybe that becomes part of the regular-season slate, in which, after everyone has played eight conference games, the standings determine who you play for the ninth?

Using last year’s eight-game SEC standings (and adjusting to avoid rematches where possible), we could have sent Texas and Georgia to play for the SEC title in Atlanta while also having 6-2 Tennessee (the No. 3 team in the standings) host 5-3 LSU, 5-3 Alabama host 5-3 Texas A&M, and so on. That would keep everyone from playing an extra game, and it would create a lot of de facto playoff play-in games even if they weren’t officially called that.

The brainstorming on this can continue for a while longer, but there’s no doubting that, though I think a clean 16-teamer is the most favorable conclusion for this long debate, there are still downsides and wrinkles to iron out.

Four-star tight end Mark Bowman announced his commitment to USC on Friday, picking the in-state Trojans over Georgia, Ole Miss, Oregon and Texas.

Bowman, No. 24 in the 2026 ESPN 300, is ESPN’s No. 3 tight end prospect in the 2026 class.

The 6-foot-5, 225-pound recruit from California’s Mater Dei High School was previously a top-ranked prospect in the 2027 cycle prior to his reclassification into the 2026 class earlier this year. He now joins five-star USC pledges Elbert Hill (No. 15) and Keenyi Pepe (No. 17) among top-100 recruits currently committed to the Trojans’ incoming recruiting class.

Following a series of spring unofficial visits, Bowman narrowed his list of finalists to seven programs earlier this month: Georgia, Miami, Ole Miss, Ohio State, Oregon, Texas and USC. Prior to his pledge, he was scheduled to take official visits with Miami, Texas, USC, Georgia and Oregon from May 30 to June 20.

Bowman caught 32 passes for 435 yards with eight touchdowns in his sophomore season at Mater Dei. He lands with USC as the program’s third-ranked commit in the program’s 2026 class, which ranks No. 1 nationally in ESPN’s latest team recruiting rankings for the cycle.

Alongside running back pledge Shahn Alston II (No. 94) and wide receiver Trent Mosley (No. 179), Bowman now leads the collection skill position talents USC is set to add in 2026 around four-star quarterback pledge Jonas Williams (No. 155), who flipped from Oregon in February.

Bowman’s pledge comes as a late-spring recruiting boost for the Trojans after four-star outside linebacker Xavier Griffin (No. 28 overall) pulled his pledge from the program earlier this month. Four-star cornerback R.J. Sermons, previously ranked as ESPN’s No. 28th-ranked prospect in 2026, reclassified into the 2025 cycle last week and will join USC this summer.

The Trojans enter the busiest stretch of the recruiting calendar next month with 13 ESPN 300 pledges. USC is set to host a key recruiting weekend starting June 6 with current commits Hill and Alston and four-star wide receiver Ethan Feaster (No. 23) and athlete Jalen Lott (No. 108) among the top prospects expected on campus.