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.
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Alden Gonzalez
Less than two years ago, the Texas Rangers rode a potent offense to the first World Series championship in franchise history. Since then — on paper, at least — that group has only improved. Established sluggers were brought in. Young, promising players accrued more seasoning. Core stars remained in their primes. And yet, over the course of 10 baseball months since hoisting the trophy on Nov. 1, 2023, the Rangers have fielded one of the sport’s worst offenses, a sobering reality that continues to vex team officials.
The circumstances of 2025 have only intensified the frustration.
The Rangers have received Cy Young-caliber production from a rejuvenated Jacob deGrom, who had compiled fewer than 200 innings over the last four years. Their rotation went into the All-Star break with the second-lowest ERA in the major leagues. Their bullpen, practically rebuilt over one offseason, ranked third. Their defense (16 outs above average) was elite, as was their baserunning (10.8 runs above average). But the Rangers, despite back-to-back wins over the first-place Detroit Tigers this weekend, find themselves only a game over .500, seven games out of first place and 2 1/2 games out of a playoff spot, because they can’t do the one thing they were expected to do best: hit.
Bret Boone, the former All-Star second baseman who was installed as the team’s hitting coach in early May, has been tasked with fixing that — but he is also realistic.
“I’m not gonna come in here and ‘abracadabra,'” he said, waving his right arm as if wielding a magic wand. “That’s the big misnomer about hitting. Hitting is really hard. The bottom line is — you can prepare as much as you want, but when you get in the box, it’s just you and that pitcher.”
Boone isn’t here for an overhaul. He’s here to encourage. To simplify. One of his prevailing messages to players, he said, has been to “watch the game” — to put away the tablet, come up to the dugout railing and see how opposing pitchers are attacking other hitters. Boone has emphasized the importance of approaching each game with a plan, whatever that might be. He has occasionally blocked off the indoor batting cage, worried that hitters of this generation swing too often. And he has encouraged conversation.
“That’s what great offenses do,” Boone said. “They’re constantly interacting.”
There might not be a more interesting team to watch ahead of the trade deadline. Rangers president of baseball operations Chris Young is not one to give up on a season, particularly with a team this talented. But one more rough patch might force him to, at least to an extent. Young would prefer to add, but it’s hard to envision a way to improve the lineup from outside.
He won’t find a better middle-infield combo than Corey Seager and Marcus Semien. Or a better outfield than Evan Carter, Wyatt Langford and Adolis García. Or a better designated hitter than Joc Pederson, who could return from a hand fracture before the end of this month. Or a better catching tandem than Jonah Heim and Kyle Higashioka. Or a better crop of corner infielders than Josh Smith, Josh Jung and Jake Burger, though Burger returned to the injured list with a quad strain earlier this week.
Any offensive improvement will probably come internally, signs of which emerged recently. The Rangers got Carter back from the bereavement list on July 4 and Langford back from the IL on July 5, making their lineup as close to whole as it has been all year. Over the ensuing week, they scored 53 runs in seven games heading into the All-Star break. Maybe it was a sign of things to come. Or, if recent history is any indication, a short burst of false promise.
Below is a look at five numbers that define the Rangers’ surprising offensive downturn.
1. Semien and Seager’s combined OPS on June 22: .671
The Rangers’ rise began in late November 2021, just before the sport shut down in the leadup to an ugly labor fight, when Semien and Seager secured contracts totaling $500 million. Their deals came within days of each other, ensuring they’d share a middle infield for years to come. And when the Rangers won it all in 2023, it was Semien and Seager hitting back-to-back at the top of the lineup, setting the tone for an offense that overwhelmed teams in October.
Some things haven’t changed: Semien and Seager are still the driving forces of this offense. For most of this year, though, that hasn’t been a positive thing.
As late as June 22, with the Rangers 78 games into their season, Semien and Seager had combined for a .229/.312/.359 slash line. Their combined OPS, .671, sat 44 points below the league average.
Semien, traditionally a slow starter, finished the month of May with the second-lowest slugging percentage among qualified hitters and at times batted ninth. Seager made two separate trips to the IL because of the same right hamstring strain and eventually fell out of whack, batting .188 in June. If the Rangers are looking for good news, though, it’s that Semien and Seager finally got going in the leadup to the All-Star break. From June 23 to July 13 — with Seager and Semien settling into the No. 2 and No. 3 spots, respectively — they slashed .313/.418/.592.
“We all want to be on at the same time,” Semien said. “It’ll never happen like that, but if Corey and I are on, this team goes.”
2. Texas’ slash line against fastballs: .236/.312/.372
One of the Rangers’ coaches recently recalled some of the most iconic homers from the team’s championship run — García’s grand slam in the American League Championship Series, and Seager’s blasts against Houston’s Cristian Javier and Arizona’s Paul Sewald.
They all had one thing in common: turning on high fastballs and pulverizing them.
The Rangers were one of the best fastball-hitting teams in 2023. That has been far from the case since. The Rangers slashed just .233/.315/.379 against four-seam fastballs in 2024, worse than every team except the Chicago White Sox, who lost a record 121 games. This year, it isn’t much better.
The Rangers’ slash line against four-seamers was only .236/.312/.372 heading into the All-Star break, good for a .684 OPS that ranked 27th in the majors. Burger (.473 OPS), Heim (.500), Pederson (.620) and García (.660) were especially vulnerable. Against four-seamers that were elevated, no team had a higher swing-and-miss percentage than Texas (55.5%).
Being in position to hit the fastball has been one of the points of emphasis from the hitting coaches in recent weeks. It doesn’t mean every hitter will look fastball first — approaches are individualistic and often alter based on matchups — but it does underscore the importance of narrowing the focus. Opposing pitchers are too good these days. Hitters can’t account for everything. And the best offenses are able to take something away from an opposing pitching staff. The 2023 team took away the fastball as an attack weapon. But the Rangers, in the words of one staffer, have been “stuck in between” ever since — late on velocity and off balance against spin.
It’s a tough way to live.
3. Rangers’ chase rate with RISP: 32.2%
When asked about the biggest difference between the 2023 offense and the 2025 version, Rangers manager Bruce Bochy mentioned the approach in run-scoring opportunities. The team from two years ago, he said, was much better at situational hitting with runners in scoring position. This team seems to chase too much in those situations.
The numbers bear that out.
The Rangers’ chase percentage with runners in scoring position was 32.2% coming out of the All-Star break, fourth worst in the major leagues. Their strikeout percentage, 23.7%, was fifth worst. Their slash line, .230/.304/.357, was down there with some of the worst teams in the sport. The Rangers’ lineup has some strikeout in it — with Burger, Jung and García at the top of that list — but team officials believe it should be much better adept at driving in runs.
Not being able to has led to some dramatic highs and lows. The Rangers have scored eight or more runs 13 times, including two instances over a 72-hour stretch in which they hung 16 runs on the Minnesota Twins. But there have also been 25 games in which they have been held to one or zero runs, third most in the major leagues.
4. Carter’s and Jung’s wOBA ranks since 2023: 205th and 264th
Entering the second half, 380 players had accumulated at least 300 plate appearances since the start of the 2024 season. Among them, Carter ranked 205th with a .308 weighted on-base average. Jung, with a .295 wOBA, ranked 264th.
Jung looked like a budding star at third base in 2023, making the All-Star team and finishing fourth in AL Rookie of the Year voting. Carter came up in September and surged throughout October. With those two and Langford, Texas’ draft pick at No. 4 earlier that summer, the Rangers had three young, controllable players they could surround with their long list of established stars. It seemed unfair, yet it hasn’t come close to panning out.
Carter struggled through the first two months of 2024, was diagnosed with a stress reaction in his back, couldn’t fully ramp back up, got shut down for good in August, didn’t look right the following spring training and started the 2025 season in Triple-A. Carter appeared in just 45 games in 2024. Jung played in only one more, after a wrist fracture held him out for most of the first four months.
Then came a stretch of 101 plate appearances this June during which Jung notched just 15 hits, 5 walks and 27 strikeouts. Eight of those strikeouts came over his last four games, when his chase rate jumped to 45.9% — 12 percentage points above his career average. A Rangers source described him as “defeated” and “lost.”
On the second day of July, Jung was optioned to Triple-A Round Rock.
5. Rangers’ wRC+ since 2023: 94
There might not be a better representation of the Rangers’ drop-off than weighted runs created plus, which attempts to quantify total offensive value by gathering every relevant statistic, assigning each its proper weight and synthesizing it all into one convenient, park- and league-adjusted metric. The league average is 100, with every tick above or below representing a percentage point better or worse than the rest of the sport at that time.
During the 2023 regular season, the Rangers put together 117 wRC+. In other words, their offense was 17% above league average. Only one team — the Atlanta Braves, another currently underperforming club — was better. From the start of the 2024 season to the start of the 2025 All-Star break, the Rangers compiled a 94 wRC+, putting them 6% below the league average. Only eight teams were worse.
Five every-day players from that 2023 team are still on the Rangers — not counting Carter, who didn’t come up until September — and all of them have seen their OPS drop by more than 100 points. Seager? 1.013 OPS in 2023, .856 OPS since. García? .836 in 2023, .681 since. Heim? .755 in 2023, .605 since. Semien? .826 in 2023, .693 since. Jung? .781 in 2023, .676 since.
For Young, it’s not just the individual performances but how they coalesce.
“What we had was just a really balanced approach and a collective mindset in terms of the way we were attacking the opposing pitcher,” Young, in his fifth season as the head of baseball operations, said of the 2023 offense. “We had other guys who could grind out at-bats. We had guys who could hit for average. We had guys who slugged. And I still think we have that in our lineup. It’s just, for whatever reason, a number of them have had bad years to start the season. When you have a couple guys having down years, you can survive. When you have a majority of them having down years, it’s magnified. And then guys start pressing and putting pressure on themselves, and it makes it even harder.”
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