USC Sanctions: How Will USC's Bowl Ban, Other Sanctions Affect Recruiting?

In the recruiting world, saying something bad about another school is taken to mean you have nothing positive to say about your own.

While that may be true for scare tactics about incompetent or conniving coaches, teams that choke in the big game or campuses with too many plus-sized girls, it's a legitimate practice when a school has something actually, functionally wrong with it.

For the next two years, USC will be playing football with half an arm—and maybe less. The NCAA has dropped the banhammer on the Trojans. Southern Cal will be forbidden from postseason play for two years and face an untold number of scholarship reductions totaling 20 or more over the next three years.

For a recruit, that's like hearing your team will have a guaranteed losing record for your freshman and sophomore seasons, and you'll be asked to do twice as much. Good luck!

Throw the Dennis Dodd columns out the window; Kiffin's was no reassuring presence. He and the rest of the Trojan squad—including the unfortunate members of the just-enrolled 2010 class—are now the fall guys for a still unrevealed series of unlawful and unethical behaviors by the USC Trojans that took place six years ago. 

In the short term, expect no less than a few transfers, released letters of intent, and very, very angry parents. Look forward to more than a few commits from USC's top-10 2011 class reopening their recruitment. Watch as players high on USC suddenly reconsider.

Most of all, expect USC's 2011 and 2012 recruiting classes to resemble something more...average.

I've heard rumblings that fringe five-star wide receiver DeAnthony Arnett out of Saginaw, MI has dropped USC entirely. Expect something similar out of five-star DT Viliami Moala, four-star OT Greg Robinson, five-star WR Kasen Williams—all USC targets with better-looking options on the table.

Some recruits want to play for a hard-luck team, intending to turn fortunes around. USC's situation is different. Their wounds are self-inflicted. The stain was left by players no longer affiliated with the program. The rehabiliation has a fixed path.

Accordingly, new players would be serving time for crimes other players committed. Any recruit that commits now does so at great professional risk to himself.

USC will survive this, and come out the other side more battle-hardened. Frankly, there's no three men I trust more to navigate these hostile waters than Kiffin, Orgeron and Kiffin, three of the finest recruiters in the business. Any other program would be well crippled by these sanctions, but Kiffin may just have what it takes to pull out of the nosedive in two years.

What's more, Coach Kiffin can expect the full support and sympathy of his fans in Los Angeles and elsewhere...so long as he's not the one the NCAA is naming in its report and throwing the book at.

But he, Ol' Monte, and Ed Orgeron can expect no such pity from the recruiters on the trail. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is still where championships are won or lost—provided you can play in them.