USC football narrowly maintains non-FCS streak by scheduling Missouri State for 2025 – Daily News

LOS ANGELES — This tightrope was as razor-thin as it gets, and yet USC somehow managed to find balance, tiptoeing toward an easier 2025 schedule without falling into an abyss of lost tradition.

For decades, the football program’s unbroken streak of never playing an FCS team – the longest in college football – has been a source of pride and tradition for a university full of them. When USC announced a future matchup with lower-tier UC Davis in 2019, fan backlash was swift and severe, with the university changing course and canceling the Aggies matchup a year later.

“Preserving our history is critically important to us and our fans,” former athletic director Mike Bohn said on a 247Sports podcast at the time, “so we have worked to make this happen.”

But in a fast-paced era of college football, USC has been forced to constantly grapple with the virtue of preserving that history while positioning itself to be most competitive in a stacked Big Ten and the expanded 12-team playoffs. And with questions swirling about the future of the program under coach Lincoln Riley, the program has so far managed to accomplish both – on Wednesday it announced it has scheduled a season opener against Missouri State in 2025.

Literally, it’s the most conceivable situation in which USC could face an FCS program without Strictly speaking facing an FCS program. Missouri State is currently in the FCS but will move up to a higher level in 2025; This USC matchup will be the Bears’ first game as an FBS school.

“Obviously you’re working on a short time frame, so there’s not just a million options,” Riley said when asked about scheduling the match on Zoom with reporters on Thursday. “A lot of people’s schedules are set, so you have — of the options, we felt like this was the best option as you look forward and see what our schedule is going to look like and what we’re already playing in the non-conference. “

The addition of Missouri State to the 2025 schedule ultimately gives the Trojans a much lighter non-conference weight than they did this season, when they faced then-13th-ranked LSU in their season opener in Las Vegas. And as Riley looks to position his program for further development into an annual CFP contender in the Big Ten, he has continued to suggest that USC may shy away from scheduling prominent non-conference opponents.

“If the conferences stay the way they are, or if the playoffs stay the way they are now, I think you’re going to see less and less of that,” Riley said during the big-time Big Ten media days in July with programs outside the conference. “Especially with us and the SEC.”

However, some national media outlets reported that Big Ten and SEC athletic directors will meet next week in Nashville, Tennessee to discuss a possible scheduling partnership between the two conferences. If such an agreement becomes a permanent part of USC’s schedule — as Riley suggested Thursday — it could force further scrutiny of USC’s non-conference scheduling habits.