For Trojan haters waiting breathlessly for the dire NCAA sanctions handed down last summer to shut off the annual pipeline of talent to USC, well, keep waiting. Even with the late defection of coveted local target De'Anthony Thomas to Oregon, Wednesday's signing class was more of the same from Lane Kiffin and Co., who held on to five-star receiver George Farmer, won surprising victories for far-flung four-stars Lamar Dawson (Danville, Ky.) and Aundrey Walker (Cleveland) and finished with signatures from an absurd 10 players ranked among Rivals' top 100 overall, more than any other team in the country. The major recruiting services with the usual love in their final rankings.That's on the quality side. But the real story remains the quantity: Less than eight months after being thwacked with the most significant scholarship reductions in a decade USC inked 30 players Wednesday, matching Arkansas and South Carolina for the largest haul of the day – and presumably there was at least one more scholarship waiting for Thomas at the end, if he wanted it.
Obviously, that chafes a bit against the sanctions. The NCAA docked 10 scholarships per year from the standard 25-scholarship limit for three years, beginning this year, limiting the Trojans to 15 scholarships per year through 2013. Eight of Wednesday's 30 signees are already enrolled for the spring semester, including touted local quarterbacks Max Wittek and Cody Kessler, and will fall under last year's (unreduced) scholarship count. Minus the early enrollees, that still leaves 22 incoming players in the fall. If that group makes it to campus intact, the Trojans will actually have about 10 more scholarship players this fall, the first season the scholarship losses were supposed to begin to really bite, than they did last year, under no scholarship restrictions.
The prevailing question of course, is how much of the class will actually make it to campus intact by the fall. Those numbers are only possible in the short term due to the university's pending appeal to reduce the sanctions: As NCAA spokesman Stacy Osburn said in a statement to the Orange County Register last month, "generally speaking, when a school is appealing a penalty, that penalty is staid until a decision by the Infractions Appeals Committee is rendered." The NCAA doesn't do specific dates for its verdicts, preferring to drop decisions from the sky like the stone plates of the Ten Commandments, but the usual 4-to-6-week timeline for responding to appeals suggests the committee will rule on the university's Jan. 22 sometimes in March, or possibly April.
In the meantime, Kiffin was more or less free to sign as away as usual, and as he told the Register on Wednesday night, "The last thing we were going to do is not sign enough players." Before Wednesday, even the optimists expected USC to stop at 20 signees (not including the early enrollees), figuring that was a good number for hedging its bets: If the appeal ultimately succeeded in reducing the scholarship reductions from ten per year to five per year, 20 additions would put the Trojans at their new limit; if the appeal fails and they found themselves stuck with the initial reductions, the potential damage won't be quite as harshly as it would have been in the wake of a full, 25-man class.
But a 22-man class portends an even more dramatic fallout if the appeals committee rejects the university's plea – or possibly even if it doesn't, if the penalty is merely scaled back to five scholarships per year. Whether it comes by rolling the existing restrictions forward onto a more severely restricted 2012 class or by purging the "extra" members of the 2011 class over the summer to meet the reduced number this fall, it's a roll of the dice. Assuming there's a plan at all, it still appears to be to keep the pedal on the floor and jump the ditches when they come to them.
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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.
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