Real talk about Malachi Nelson, Dylan Raiola, Elijah Brown, and the USC QB room

If Dylan Raiola had committed to #USC, would Malachi Nelson have stayed? We’ll never know the answer to that question, but it’s a fascinating topic.

USC lost out on the top recruit in the 2024 class, Dylan Raiola. It would be easier to minimize this recruiting loss if Lincoln Riley didn’t make a robust effort to land his next great quarterback at Heritage Hall. This is competition. It’s supposed to hurt when any competitor goes hard but doesn’t get rewarded and obtain the desired outcome. USC would be in a better position for the future if it had Dylan Raiola. We can admit that. Yet, we can also say it’s not the full story.

Imagine a world in which Dylan Raiola did in fact commit to USC. What then? As good as that would have been for USC, it wouldn’t have been a consequence-free event. New plot points would have emerged if Raiola had committed to the Trojans.

On our recent show with Mark Rogers at The Voice of College Football, we walked through some of these scenarios.

Let’s dive into this discussion and offer a few other notes from our recent USC show with Mark: