Just days after it surfaced that USC football had attempted for nearly two years to back out of their 2024 season debut against LSU to be held at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, Nevada, it is being reported that they and the Florida Gators could not come to an agreement on which year they would meet for the third time in the school’s history.
Las Vegas Game Controversy Has New Storylines For USC Football
Non-conference game scheduling happens years in advance, so the current USC Athletic Administration was not around, and Lincoln Riley was still coaching at Oklahoma. Case in point, Dan Mullen is the source of this information, and he hasn’t been the coach of Florida since 2021.
It is very rare that an SEC team comes out west. In recent memory, just about every PAC 12 – SEC regular season matchup has been a home game for the SEC team or occurred no further west than Dallas. We don’t know why the negotiations fell apart (other than the note that a year could not be agreed upon), but it did and then LSU came calling.
Just based on the coaching timeline of when these negotiations happened, my guess is that Ed Orgeron was the coach of LSU at the time. I think everyone knows that he would have done just about anything to get a chance to play USC, a team that he previously coached for (LSU also played UCLA at the Rose Bowl in 2021.
But that was then, and a few years later, the powers of USC had changed to Lincoln Riley and Jen Cohen, and there was the slight change of going from the PAC 12 to the Big Ten.
This is where reports stemmed from that the Trojans then tried to back out of the matchup with LSU in Vegas altogether.
According to sources of Saturday Down South,
“More than 10 games” on various schedules had to be moved to accommodate the LSU game, and there was significant “logistical legwork” to make it happen.”
“As late as last fall, after Jen Cohen was hired away from Washington to be the new USC athletic director, the USC administration was still trying to get out of the game, including offering other opponents to LSU.”
Take all of this as you want, cause at the end of the day, the USC Trojans will be playing the LSU Tigers in Las Vegas on September 1. It should be fireworks.
