How does USC replace Caleb Williams? By adding 1,400 pounds
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Paolo Uggetti, ESPN
LOS ANGELES, CA — It doesn’t take much to see that things are different at USC this year.
Yes, Lincoln Riley is still the head coach — his third season, in fact — and the Trojans do return a number of players from last season and several other coaches too. The goal, the message, the approach — nobody will tell you any of those have changed. But it’s also clear that things are very different indeed.
Walk onto the practice field and you’ll immediately see the glossy, green new turf field USC has built being shown off and utilized. The practice area is now twice as large. Look around and you’ll see banners announcing what’s coming: an entirely new football facility, expected to cost, $200 million, coming in 2026.
Take a closer look out onto the aforementioned field and you’ll see plenty of changes too. D’Anton Lynn has gone from wearing UCLA Bruins blue and gold to hopscotching his way down the 405 freeway to try and take USC’s defense into the future. Anyone who watched a game of the Trojans last year knows they need it.
Lynn’s deluge of a move brought along others in the same current, not just coaches from around the country with breadth and depth of experience in college and the NFL, but also much-needed talented defenders from UCLA, Oregon State and Texas A&M to try and improve both in the present and the future.
“I do think that we’re fortunate enough to be at a place that you can have a shot at anybody,” Riley said when he hired Lynn. “We just decided that we’re not going to worry about a current job that these guys have. We’re going to go after the best.”
And yet perhaps the biggest change, the weightiest and most consequential, can be found under center. Caleb Williams is gone. Enter Miller Moss. The junior, who backed up Williams the past two seasons, is both a fresh face and a familiar one. It is as close to continuity as USC could have gotten short of convincing Williams to forego the NFL one more season.
Zoom in just a bit more and you can also see what many players and coaches have been talking about for much of the offseason. The Trojans are bigger — 1,400 collective pounds bigger, according to Riley — and have put an emphasis on reshaping their roster. Literally.
“When we got here, just with the scheme change going into the new conference, we knew that we had to get bigger,” Lynn said. “We knew we had to get stronger.”
USC’s 2024 season will not fully be determined by what life after Williams may look like. It won’t come down to how much weight or strength they’ve gained, or be expected to be overhauled by a single coaching hire.
Without a Heisman Trophy winner and No. 1 overall pick on its roster, USC is banking on what it has been able to build and evolve over the past three years under Riley to turn what could be a down year for the Trojans into one where they could be in a position to surprise.
“I feel a bright energy around the team this year,” wide receiver Zachariah Branch said. “I definitely feel like everybody’s fully invested into the team and I feel like that’s just going to help us excel.”
AT SOME POINT, Elijah Paige and Mason Murphy stopped counting calories. The mandate this offseason from the coaching staff and Rachel Suba, USC’s director of sports nutrition, was that USC linemen would eat about 5,000 to 6,000 calories a day, but once you get to a certain routine with the amount of food, the calories count is second nature.
“I got to the point where I was more just eating a lot of big meals,” Murphy said. “Four big meals a day, so that definitely gave me some gains.”
“I was just eating whatever they put in front of me,” Paige said. “Whatever I could eat to gain weight.”
Behind the 1,400-pound total that Riley touted are Suba and Bennie Wylie, USC’s director of sports performance, who were the architects of the offseason fitness plan that players committed to.
Suba and Wylie created a cohesive offseason plan for players and each position group that catered to their needs — be it gaining weight, losing it or simply maintaining. From the meals to the workouts, the goal was to get stronger in preparation for a season that would be different in more ways than one.
“They have physically prepared us and that has just mentally prepared us to be ready for this season,” safety Christian Pierce said. “I feel like now our strength is in our conditioning.”
The total weight added may be the headline, but USC’s players have been individually sharing before and after photos of their progress, and more specifically, the weight gained and body fat lost in the process. The added strength, the way the whole team has embraced the process of getting bigger and faster, seems to have emboldened USC’s roster as it enters a new fray it knows will ask far more than previous seasons have.
“I think last year the emphasis and the importance of getting bigger and stronger was shown,” cornerback Bryson Shaw said. His own offseason calorie count hovered around 4,500. “We knew we needed to improve in that area and Coach Wiley and his staff challenged us to respond to the criticism. And I think we really responded well. Going into this season, I think we’re much way more ahead than where we were going into last season.”
What looms larger is the unforeseen nature of playing in an entirely new conference, where different styles and different opponents await. Like Lynn, some coaches and players view the added emphasis on strength as a necessary point of transitioning into the Big Ten.
“We want to have a physical presence. We want to talk about being one of the most physical or if not the most physical team in the country,” linebackers coach Matt Entz said. Last year, USC missed a total of 141 tackles. “It’s a game of blocking and tackling. Not to oversimplify the game, but sometimes as coaches it’s easy to do that. We need to be fundamentally better than our opponents and that’s where we’re at right now. We got to continue to every day go out there with that mentality.”
THE ELEPHANT IN the room all of last season — and really, the past two years — was USC’s defense. At its best, it was bending but not breaking enough to allow them to stay in games. At its worst, it was actively working against an offense that, at times, was one of the best in the country.
Riley relented and fired defensive coordinator Alex Grinch with two games left in the regular season. Then, as many people expected that USC would look far and wide for a replacement — perhaps into Big Ten country even — Riley simply reached across town and hired the coach that turned UCLA’s defense into one of the best in the country.
With Lynn came not just the subsequent hires of secondary coach Doug Belk from Houston, North Dakota State head coach Entz to coach linebackers and former NFL assistant Eric Henderson to coach the defensive line.
“It’s revamped the energy in the building, something that we needed,” Shaw said of the new staff.
While several returning members of USC’s defense — and those who are new as well — are avoiding comparing and contrasting what this year’s defense already feels like to last, some are not hesitating in doing just that.
“The culture last year wasn’t something that everyone was upholding and agreed to uphold. It had to do with a lot of the leaders just letting stuff slide, not thinking everything mattered,” linebacker Mason Cobb said. “So for this year, I think a lot of guys have been here, a lot of transfers have understood what we’re trying to do here and hopped on board and everyone’s on board.”
“I would say it’s night and day when it comes to this year and last year,” quarterback Moss said of the defense. “I think going against obviously guys like Kamari [Ramsey], Easton [Mascarenas-Arnold] who came in, Mason Cobb, along with a lot of really special players in the secondary makes it difficult for me as a quarterback. But it also makes me better.”
Without divulging strategy, USC defenders and other coaches have described Lynn’s system as “simplified,” “versatile,” “aggressive,” “fun to learn” and one that allows them to feel “freed up” and “play to their strengths.”
“I think it is a pro scheme, multiple fronts, multiple coverages, a lot of things that could potentially confuse our opponent,” Belk said. “But most of all it’s player friendly and we want to be able to play fast and play physical and play smart football and be consistent in whatever we do.”
At the center of it is Lynn, who appears to have impressed everyone in the building with how quickly he’s not just found his groove with a new staff and roster, but how he is managing trying to bring players up to speed while attempting to get the unit as a whole to feel and play in a cohesive fashion.
“The toughest thing in college is just the timeframe that you have,” Lynn said. “You don’t have a ton of time to meet, so you have to be very efficient with how you install. You don’t have a ton of time on the field. You have to be very efficient with how you do your walkthroughs.”
With a limited amount of time and what amounts to a new language that Lynn has to teach and implement within his staff and throughout the unit, USC’s defense has gone through a fast tracked education between spring practice and fall camp. Lynn, for his part, has tried his best to keep things simple enough to be digestible but not diluted to the point where they are not effective.
“[Lynn] does an outstanding job of compartmentalizing what we’re doing from a teaching standpoint,” Entz said. “If we can teach the game in terms of concepts and rules and principles, then you should be able to have some volume to the defense. If you have to go out there and your players are memorizing what’s going on, you’re going to struggle a little bit.”
There’s no certainty that Lynn’s scheme and approach will pay dividends, especially not immediately, but the preparation has put USC in a position to immediately improve upon last year’s performance. The bar may be low, but the goals Lynn and the rest of the defense have for themselves are much higher.
“You’ve seen what he did in one year at UCLA made them one of the best defenses in the country,” linebacker and Oregon State transfer Mascarenas-Arnold said. “And so for me, I expect nothing less. I don’t think anybody else on the team wouldn’t say that either. So I think we have the potential to be one of the best.”
MUCH OF HOW USC navigates a schedule that includes LSU, Michigan, Penn State, Washington and Notre Dame may still come down to Moss. This is a Riley offense and team, after all, where the attacking unit is the show and the quarterback is the orchestra’s first chair.
Williams had his approach and style; Moss has his own. The connectivity between them should have the intended effect. Several of the players that Moss first practiced with on scout team during his early years at USC are now projected starters themselves.
“I’ve already had chemistry with Miller because that first year we were both here, we always connected in practice really well,” said wide receiver Kyle Ford, who was at USC for two full seasons before transferring to UCLA last year and back to USC this year. “Now it’s just a continuation of what that’s been. I’m glad that we didn’t lose it over the years.”
It is not quite an intangible, but Moss’ commitment to USC over the years is now reaping its rewards, not just in the form of a starting job he coveted, but more in the form of how his peers, teammates and all of those who will take cues from him as a leader now view him.
“He’s going into his fourth year at USC and so I think all the guys have a different level of respect for him and what he’s done his whole journey,” Branch said. “He is far and away the leader of this football team. I think he has really just been able to bring the team together. Everyone rallies around him.”
Moss’ six touchdowns in the DirecTv Holiday Bowl that all but secured him the starting gig was just the beginning. Since, he admitted he’s gone through a learning curve as he tries to ensure that his performance in December is not remembered as an aberration, a mere blip on his college career, but rather a harbinger of what he can do once this season begins.
Now that he’s in the driver’s seat, Moss has gained a level of comfort and personal experience inside Riley’s system. Everything he tried to soak up while sitting on the bench the past two seasons is now ready to be put to use.
“At the end of the day, I think it’s more about what you do with it than just being named the starter,” Moss said. “It’s about going and winning games.”
Riley, Moss, Lynn and the rest of USC’s team know as well as anyone that in the end, all of the extra work, the effort put into weight training or nutrition, into improving the makeup of this team, can be rendered meaningless in the span of a game, even a play. For all the change USC is experiencing in its first year without Williams, there is one thing that remains: it will all come down to results.
ATLANTA — Ronald Acuña Jr. crushed his first pitch 467 feet for a home run in his dramatic return to the Atlanta Braves on Friday night, almost one year after he tore his left ACL.
Acuña, in his customary leadoff position in the lineup, turned on a fastball from San Diego Padres right-hander Nick Pivetta and sent the ball into the seats in left-center. Acuña hesitated briefly on his jog around the bases for a shuffle step.
The homer by Acuña had an exit velocity of 115.5 mph. It was the hardest hit ball by a Braves player this season.
Acuña added a single in his next at-bat and also enjoyed a defensive highlight, throwing out Elias Díaz at second base in the eighth following Díaz’s single.
But San Diego’s Manny Machado hit a tiebreaking homer off Raisel Iglesias in the ninth inning to overcome Acuña’s homer and beat the Braves 2-1 to end a six-game losing streak.
Acuña said after the game “I had a feeling” about hitting a homer in his return.
When asked if he meant he had a feeling about a first-pitch homer, Acuña said: “Exactly how it happened. … To me that’s just the culmination of all the work I put in.”
Infielder Orlando Arcia, a 2023 All-Star, was designated for assignment to clear a roster spot for Acuña, who started in right field.
Acuña said through interpreter Franco Garcia that he was “super excited, super happy” to make his return and added “I couldn’t sleep that much” after receiving the news of his return Thursday.
Braves manager Brian Snitker announced after Thursday night’s 8-7 loss at Washington that Acuña would make his season debut Friday night.
Snitker said Friday it felt good to make out his first lineup of 2025 that included Acuña.
“He’s one of those players that you better not go get a beer or whatever because you might miss something really cool, you know?” Snitker said. “I mean, he’s that type of force, I think, in the game. I think he’s going to energize everybody. Going to energize the fans. Going to energize his teammates.”
Acuña, the 2023 NL MVP, hurt his left knee May 26, 2024, and had surgery on June 6. The 27-year-old played six games in the minors on a rehab assignment, going 6-for-15 with two home runs.
Acuña played in only 49 games last season, batting .250 with four homers, 15 RBIs, 16 stolen bases and a .716 OPS.
This is Acuña’s second comeback from a major knee injury. He tore his right ACL on July 10, 2021, and returned the following April. When asked Friday what is different about this rehabilitation process, he said, “Patience. The patience, for sure. … I just think I’m in a much better place.”
Atlanta is 24-26 after an 0-7 start.
“It’s huge,” third baseman Austin Riley said. “The talent is there. The energy he brings, having Ronald up there at the top of the lineup. … He can change a game at any point.”
Acuña was a unanimous NL MVP in 2023 when he hit .336 with 41 home runs, 106 RBIs and a league-leading 1.012 OPS. Acuña also stole 73 bases that year to become the only player with 40 homers and 70 steals in one season.
Arcia, 30, was a 2023 NL All-Star when he hit .264 with 17 homers and 65 RBIs. Arcia lost his starting job due to an inability to compensate at the plate while suffering a defensive decline. He hit only .194 in 31 at-bats this season.
Snitker said he hopes Arcia will accept a minor league assignment if he does not land another job in the majors.
“I think we all know that it’s a business,” Acuña said of Arcia getting cut. “I’m happy to be back but I’m sorry that’s the move.”
Nick Allen has taken over as the starting shortstop. Snitker said Luke Williams is the backup shortstop and Eli White, a part-time starter in the outfield, will see more time in the infield.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
The Edmonton Oilers atoned for letting Game 1 of the Western Conference finals slip away in a dominating 3-0 Game 2 win over the Dallas Stars on Friday to even the series.
Oilers goaltender Stuart Skinner continued to be the most boom-or-bust player in the postseason. He gave up 20 goals and didn’t have a save percentage better than .833 in four losses. His three wins? All shutouts, becoming just the second Edmonton goalie in franchise history to record three in a playoff year. (The other was Curtis Joseph in 1998.)
Once again, the Oilers flexed their impressive depth. The stars combined on their power-play goal in the first period, with Ryan Nugent-Hopkins getting the tally on assists from Evan Bouchard and Leon Draisaitl. The other two non-empty-netters: Brett Kulak‘s first of the playoffs, snapping his rebound past Jake Oettinger; and Connor Brown, continuing an incredible playoff run with his fifth goal in the second period.
(Of course, the highlight of Brown’s night was avoiding a calamitous injury when Mikael Granlund‘s skate nearly clipped his face.)
How did both teams perform? What are the big questions facing each team ahead of Game 3 on Sunday afternoon in Edmonton? Here’s our breakdown of the Oilers’ Game 2 win.
As I warned after Game 1: Not every game of the Western Conference finals would have a third-period implosion by the Oilers, nor the power-play success the Stars enjoyed to rally for that win.
Edmonton continued to roll at 5-on-5, winning the special teams battle. The Stars weren’t sharp on the details. There were too many shots that didn’t get through to Stuart Skinner, and there were not enough moments that truly tested the Edmonton goalie — outside of a third-period short-handed breakaway that Wyatt Johnston couldn’t convert, extending his drought to one point in eight games.
The Stars had more giveaways through two periods (21) than they had in any game of the 2025 postseason. That’s gift-wrapping the game to Edmonton. The Oilers were going to be desperate after losing Game 1, and Dallas didn’t come close to answering that effort or execution. — Greg Wyshynski
Edmonton Oilers
Grade: A
Edmonton got the start it wanted in Game 2 — Ryan Nugent-Hopkins tallied an early power-play goal that felt like exacting revenge on that costly, penalty-filled third period the Oilers handed Dallas in Game 1. Then, Edmonton tempted fate, handing the Stars a power play — but neutralized it with an excellent kill. That was a confidence booster.
The Oilers followed that by holding Dallas at bay in the second frame, when Skinner was particularly strong as the Stars pushed for an equalizer. That success set up Edmonton to extend its lead with a pair of goals in just 1:13, off a powerful shot from Brett Kulak and a tip from Connor Brown. Edmonton exorcised a few more demons by killing the Stars’ power-play opportunities in the third period.
This was a low-shot game, with only three registered from both sides by midway through the frame, and it was clear how much effort Edmonton was exerting in trying to limit Dallas’ chances. It worked in the end. And a round of applause for Skinner, who rebounded from a brutal performance in the final 20 minutes of Game 1 to be a true difference-maker while recording his third shutout in four games. — Kristen Shilton
0:32
Ryan Nugent-Hopkins tips in opening goal for Oilers
Ryan Nugent-Hopkins buries the goal for Edmonton to give the Oilers an early 1-0 lead.
Three Stars of Game 2
Nugent-Hopkins had a goal and an assist, and his power-play goal to open the scoring was the winner. He has multipoint outings in both games of this series, and both of the Oilers’ power-play goals through two games.
Skinner had 25 saves for his third shutout of the postseason, joining Curtis Joseph in 1998 as the only Oilers goalies with three clean sheets in a postseason.
3. Bouncing back
The Oilers flushed an abysmal third period in Game 1 to control Game 2 virtually for the entire 60 minutes, en route to a 3-0 victory to even the series heading to Edmonton for Games 3 and 4. — Arda Öcal
Players to watch in Game 3
The Stars winger shares the postseason scoring lead with McDavid and Leon Draisaitl, at 20 points, thanks to a four-game stretch in which he has generated only one point — a power-play assist in Game 1 of this series. Rantanen earned all of his Conn Smythe hype by carrying the Stars through their first-round win over the Colorado Avalanche, and then posting two, three-point games in wins over the Winnipeg Jets.
But in Game 2, he had as many shot attempts as he did giveaways (three). Neither number is good for the Stars. With Roope Hintz leaving Game 2 because of an injury, there are even more questions about their top line, which hasn’t produced an even-strength goal since Game 4 against the Jets. — Wyshynski
Fans are always watching for McDavid. But for all McDavid’s marvellous moves and powerful playmaking, he hasn’t been a goal-scoring threat for Edmonton. McDavid has just three goals (with 20 points) in these playoffs, and 11 goals in his past 38 postseason contests.
There’s no discounting McDavid’s impact on the Oilers’ game, but there’s a need to see him light the lamp, too. Right now, McDavid is sitting on just one goal since Game 3 of Edmonton’s first-round series against Los Angeles. The Oilers are matching up well against the Stars at 5-on-5 in the series. And McDavid appeared to ring the iron at least once in Game 2.
If McDavid can put more doubt in Dallas by slipping one (or more) past Jake Oettinger, it could ignite Edmonton’s game further — and nothing would get the Oilers’ home crowd fired up quite like seeing the captain go off. — Shilton
Big questions for Game 3
What’s the status of Roope Hintz?
The Stars lost their top center in the third period after a nasty slash to the top of the skate by Edmonton defenseman Darnell Nurse. Hintz crumpled to the ice, clutching his left leg and needed help leaving the playing surface just 3:40 into the final period.
Nurse received only a minor penalty after the officials reviewed it — and the Department of Player Safety will review it further.
Losing Hintz, or having him diminished, would be a huge blow to Dallas, as the veteran Finn has five goals and six assists in 14 games, also playing on the Stars’ power play and penalty kill. — Wyshynski
The Oilers should be feeling good as the series shifts to their home ice. Getting one of the club’s top defensemen back would be an enormous boost for the Oilers, too.
Ekholm has been sidelined because of an undisclosed injury since mid-April, missing all of the Oilers’ postseason run to date. But he returned to practice Thursday, and though he remains day-to-day, even Ekholm admitted he didn’t expect to be back soon.
Edmonton has leaned on Ty Emberson and Troy Stecher in Ekholm’s absence, but there’s no question he would strengthen its back end when he’s ready. The Oilers must prepare for Dallas’ response in Game 3, and having Ekholm — who averaged 22 minutes in the regular season for Edmonton, while collecting nine goals and 33 points — makes that more manageable. — Shilton
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