Check out the all new PLAY hub with puzzles, games and more!<\/a>Washington<\/p>\nUSC is — again — clearly way better than Washington on an all-time basis, but Washington has appeared in a playoff and in a national title game in separate seasons over the past 10 years. USC hasn’t even made the playoff.<\/p>\n
Utah<\/p>\n
The Utes have very little going for them in terms of all-time college football achievements, but they have been markedly better than USC over the past decade and a half, similar to Oregon.<\/p>\n
Ohio State<\/p>\n
This one requires zero explanation.<\/p>\n
Michigan<\/p>\n
No debate about this one, either.<\/p>\n
Penn State<\/p>\n
This is not a close call as well.<\/p>\n
BYU<\/p>\n
Kalani Sitake has clearly elevated BYU above USC.<\/p>\n
Non-Big Ten, non-Western programs better than USC right now<\/p>\n
Alabama, Georgia, Clemson, Oklahoma, Miami, Ole Miss, Texas A&M, Notre Dame, and Texas Tech are all better than the Trojans and Lincoln Riley at the moment. We have listed 17 schools empirically better than USC in the present tense — not on an all-time scale, but certainly within the context of the past two, five, 10, or 16 seasons. Given that USC has failed to make the College Football Playoff even once in the past 12 seasons, it’s not controversial to say USC isn’t a top-16 football program in the playoff era.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"March 28, 2026, 5:53 a.m. PT On a historical level, of course USC football is a top-16 program.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":840560,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[95878,7,49,48,98210,96358,95882,95946,96152,107935,101727,95897,96008,95883,98212,95881],"class_list":{"0":"post-840559","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ncaa-football","8":"tag-accessfree","9":"tag-football","10":"tag-ncaa","11":"tag-ncaa-football","12":"tag-sstssportscollegetrojansfootball","13":"tag-sstsnfootball","14":"tag-tagamerican-football","15":"tag-tagcalifornia-gold-rush","16":"tag-tagcollege-football","17":"tag-taglincoln-riley","18":"tag-tagncaa-mens-basketball-tournament","19":"tag-tagoverall-negative","20":"tag-tagsmg-listicle","21":"tag-tagsports-news","22":"tag-tagusc-trojans","23":"tag-typestory"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/116311461235465626","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/840559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=840559"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/840559\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/840560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=840559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=840559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=840559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}