It has been an awful 24-hour period for USC football. There’s no other way to say it. Justus Terry and Isaiah Gibson leaving the program has greatly diminished the quality of the 2025 recruiting class and the defensive line room. The roster hits are obviously damaging in and of themselves, but seeing two players — not just one — leave the program in a short period of time will feed into national perceptions that USC just isn’t on the same level as the big boys. It is exactly the perception Lincoln Riley is trying to change, but now that task becomes so much harder. Eric Henderson had seemingly sold two very talented players on his NFL player development skills, but that selling point didn’t hold up. It doesn’t mean Henderson failed; it likely means other schools (most likely in the SEC) had compensation packages Gibson and Terry couldn’t pass up. USC’s NIL setup will be questioned, but there is not an unlimited amount of resources for every player. At some point, players have to choose what matters to them. NFL development doesn’t appear to have been the No. 1 priority for Terry and Gibson. That doesn’t make them wrong. It doesn’t make their decisions flawed. It just means they valued certain things above others. USC, unfortunately, is on the wrong end of those value decisions.
You can imagine how social media reacted to these two USC decommitments below: