Times of Troy: How will a new university president shape USC athletics?

Welcome back to another edition of the Times of Troy newsletter, fresh off a pretty consequential week at USC, one you might have missed while eating ungodly amounts of potato salad or sipping margaritas by the pool. But I’m here to catch you up.

July 1, in particular, marked a major turning point for the University of Southern California. Not only was it Carol Folt’s final day as university president, but it was also the first day of a new era for all of college sports, as USC and other schools are now officially permitted to make direct payments to their athletes.

Both changes will have a profound impact on USC’s athletic department and how it operates going forward.

But let’s focus on Folt’s exit. I wrote in November about the imprint her six years as president would leave on USC athletics. She made investing in athletics one of her “moonshot” goals and, by most accounts, followed through on that promise. She signed off on the hire of Lincoln Riley, which cost the university over $20 million in the first year and more than $10 million per year since, and ushered forth the school’s move to the Big Ten, which will help its bottom line. Then last November, Folt was there with ceremonial shovel in hand to break ground on the Bloom Football Performance Center, the gleaming centerpiece of a $225-million fundraising initiative that will forever be part of her legacy. She announced her exit soon after.

Say what you will about Folt — and I have said plenty in this space — but she saw the value in investing in athletics. She understood that the football program was the front porch of the university.

There’s no guarantee that USC’s next president will have the same approach.

Whoever that is will have plenty more pressing problems to deal with first. He or she will inherit a university that reported a staggering $158-million budget deficit for 2023-24 and could now face even more dire financial straits courtesy of the Trump administration, with the potential for major cuts to federal research funding, among other things, in near the future.

No matter what happens, USC’s next president will have a serious financial crisis to solve, a furious faculty to calm and a tense political climate to navigate. Athletics, in the grand scheme, probably shouldn’t be front-of-mind. But the new president’s perspective on college athletics — and their plans for the university as a whole — will have wide-reaching implications for USC’s athletic department going forward.

Take the last two presidents at USC. Folt arrived in 2019 in the aftermath of the Varsity Blues scandal — as well as several other scandals — with an edict to clean up the university. Right away, she set out to reshape athletics, forcing out athletic director Lynn Swann two months after taking the job. She fired three other senior officials a few months after that.

Before her, Max Nikias took the helm in 2010 and immediately announced a $6-billion fundraising initiative, the largest in the history of higher education at the time. In six years, the university raised as much as it had in the previous six decades combined, $760 million of which came from athletics. That directive would shape how every department functioned. In athletics, I’d argue that it set the tone for Varsity Blues.

The new president now takes over at a time when college athletics have never been more expensive. Not only will USC use the full allotted revenue-sharing cap of $20.5 million — $2.5 of which will likely be counted for scholarships — but the expectation is it will spend much more in additional scholarships beyond that. That’s no small expenditure.

Already, no one else was reaching as deeply into their pockets for athletics as USC. According to the most recent Department of Education data, USC reported over $242 million in total athletics expenses between July 2023 and July 2024, more than every other Big Ten or Southeastern Conference school by a considerable margin. (USC also reported $242 million in revenue.)

That number is almost certainly higher this year, too. And from 2025 to 2026, we know at least $20.5 million — and likely much more — will be added to the total.

But the bigger question, in this time of great uncertainty and unexplored gray area, may be what the new president’s tolerance for pushing the envelope will be. At the advent of NIL, when third-party collectives were first coming to the forefront, multiple officials within the department told me that Folt had no interest in wading into the gray area of boosters directly paying football players. She was, after all, the president hired to clean up the school’s image. It wasn’t until a federal judge opened the floodgates on NIL that USC even stepped in with both feet.

It’s going to take more innovative thinking than that to “win the new era” of college athletics. Will the new president have the stomach for working outside the rev-share cap? What about collective bargaining with college football players? Or a Big Ten-SEC super league?

USC has the right leaders in place at the top of its athletic department, and I’ve only heard positive feedback around the department about interim university president Beong-Soo Kim.

But whomever is hired for the permanent job will take the reins at an especially critical time for college athletics. And wherever they stand could change everything about the direction in which USC is headed.

USC and Texas A&M track and field athletes and coaches pose with NCAA trophies after being crowned co-champions. USC has already sent at least one track athlete through the NIL clearinghouse to get their compensation approved.

(C. Morgan Engel / NCAA Photos via Getty Images)

— USC has already had deals approved by the NIL clearinghouse. All third-party NIL deals over $600 must now be approved by NIL Go, the clearinghouse run by Deloitte that’s set up to determine whether deals have a legitimate business purpose and fall within a reasonable range of compensation. There will be ways to get around that, of course. For one, schools all over the country front-loaded as many NIL deals as they could before the July 1 deadline, so as to not have to use the clearinghouse. But USC has successfully used the clearinghouse already, and it wasn’t for football like you might assume. The first of those deals, an official said, came from USC’s track and water polo programs.

— USC continues to be an unstoppable force on the recruiting trail. The latest addition to the Trojans’ No. 1 class comes at receiver, as Ethan “Boobie” Feaster committed last week, giving USC three four-star wideouts and eight top-100 prospects in 2026. Feaster, who reclassified from the 2027 class, looks like he could be the best of the bunch. USC now has the No. 1 tight end, the No. 2 offensive tackle, the 7th- and 10th-ranked receivers and the 5th- and 9th-ranked running backs committed — and its class on defense might still be better!

—USC’s women’s basketball program has a new general manager. Selena Castillo spent the last two years as director of external affairs for Duke’s women’s basketball team. She replaces Amy Broadhead, whose hire last September was hailed at the time as a groundbreaking move for the program. Broadhead ultimately chose to leave college athletics of her own accord just nine months later, for a job at the streaming service Crunchyroll. Now Castillo steps into a key role, at a key time. It’ll be up to her to maximize the rare window that USC has now with young, marketable stars like JuJu Watkins and Jazzy Davidson in the fold.

—What’s up with the transfer exodus out of USC baseball? When I spoke with Andy Stankiewicz ahead of our last edition of this newsletter, he singled out outfielder Brayden Dowd as a player he was excited about heading into next season. Well, Dowd has since entered the transfer portal, along with 16 of his teammates. That’s a significant portion of last year’s NCAA tournament roster. Dowd, who hit .324 with 52 runs, 10 home runs and 36 RBI last season, is the only major loss in the batting order. But the Trojans will have a ton of talent to replace on the mound, with its two top starters out (Caden Aoki, via transfer, Caden Hunter, via the draft) and its two top relievers, by ERA, transferring (Brodie Purcell and Jude Favela).

—There’s a new one-time transfer window from July 7-Aug. 5, but don’t expect the usual chaos. The only athletes permitted to transfer in that window will be those listed as “Designated Student-Athletes” by their respective schools, and the only athletes listed as DSAs are those who would have been removed from a roster in 2025-26 because of new roster limits from the House settlement. In other words, this would only really affect athletes on the back-end of rosters, many of which would have previously been viewed as walk-ons. So, for now, no need for any more transfer panic.

—Should college athletes and staff be allowed to bet on other sports? That’s a question that was recently asked by the NCAA Division 1 Council to its membership. Whether you agree morally or not, the reality is the NCAA simply doesn’t have the bandwidth to police all forms of sports betting on campus. Betting on college sports will obviously still be against the rules — and punishable by a lifetime ban — and the Council was clear that it doesn’t “endorse” gambling. But betting on other sports could be an option moving forward.

Food for thought

Joey Chestnut wins the Nathan’s Annual Hot Dog Eating Contest on July 4 in New York City.

(Adam Gray / Getty Images)

Growing up in the Kartje household, it was tradition that every July 4 we would watch the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest. This year, after a few years off, I got to share those 10 gloriously gluttonous minutes with my son.

We’re still working on his hot-dog eating fundamentals. (According to my wife, toddlers are not supposed to competitively eat. Ugh. Lame.) But the whole experience got me ruminating on a question I’d seen asked before on social media: How many hot dogs have I actually eaten in my lifetime?

I’ll spare you the methodology here, but let’s just say I’m looking at between 600-700 hot dogs, conservatively, in my lifetime. Gulp.

In case you missed it

USC commit Andrew Williams proves the City Section still has football talent

‘I’m panicking.’ USC’s Alijah Arenas recounts harrowing escape from Cybertruck crash

Judge rules Reggie Bush must pay Lloyd Lake $1.4 million in defamation case

Three years after USC and UCLA led mass defections, Pac-12 adds Texas State as 8th member

Times of Troy: How will USC allocate the $20.5 million it can pay its athletes?

What I’m watching this week

Matthew Goode, right, stars in the Netflix series “Dept. Q.”

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

I’m a sucker for a British crime drama, so it’s no surprise that I’ve enjoyed Netflix’s “Dept. Q.” Set in Scotland, the show follows an ornery police detective begrudgingly leading a misfit cold-case unit. It reminds me of Sherlock, another fantastic entry in the genre featuring a prickly lead. Matthew Goode, the star of Dept. Q, is particularly good at playing prickly.

Until next time….

That concludes today’s newsletter. If you have any feedback, ideas for improvement or things you’d like to see, email me at ryan.kartje@latimes.com, and follow me on Twitter at @Ryan_Kartje. To get this newsletter in your inbox, click here.