LOS ANGELES — The honeymoon is over. USC and UCLA are heading into their third Big Ten season, and the goodwill that comes with being the new arrivals has officially expired.
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The first two years were about logistics. Coaches and administrators complained openly about the grind the move put on Olympic sports programs suddenly scheduling cross-country trips for volleyball, soccer and basketball against schools in Michigan, Wisconsin and Indiana. Football absorbed the travel differently, with charter flights and bye-week scheduling built to cushion the blow. Water polo, gymnastics and baseball had no such luxury. They just adapted to a conference footprint that runs from the Pacific coast to the East Coast, and that's not changing.
Now the conversation has moved from adjustment to accountability. Both LA programs signed on to the Big Ten with the understanding that the payoff would come in television money and national exposure. Fine. But that promise carries an implicit demand: actually compete. The Big Ten's media rights deals were sold on the premise that USC and UCLA would be contenders, not just dues-paying members while the old-guard programs from the Midwest monopolize the College Football Playoff conversation.
USC's story so far has been roster churn and a coaching staff under real pressure to prove the transfer portal works just as well against Big Ten defenses as it did in Pac-12 play. Lincoln Riley came to Los Angeles with a reputation for scoring points, and the conference move has stress-tested what that identity looks like against the physical, defense-first football that built this league's reputation. The results were uneven. How fast Riley closes that gap this season will determine how soon USC gets back into the playoff picture.
UCLA's situation is different and, frankly, harder. The Bruins are rebuilding under a new coaching staff, without the national recruiting pull USC's brand provides. The administration has framed the Big Ten move as a financial lifeline for an athletic department that has dealt with budget shortfalls for years, a rationale that predates realignment and has been well documented. Whether that financial stability actually shows up on the field is the open question for 2025.
Even the rivalry has changed shape. For decades, the USC-UCLA game came loaded with Pac-12 and Rose Bowl stakes, a late-November showdown with real consequences. Now it's a Big Ten crossover game between two programs that no longer share a conference title race with the regional rivals who defined California football for generations. Stanford and Cal bolted to the ACC in the same realignment wave, killing another set of rivalries that had shaped West Coast football for over a century. Oregon and Washington followed USC and UCLA into the Big Ten. The four marquee programs of the old Pac-12 are now split between two conferences that had never set foot on the West Coast before 2024.
That fragmentation raises a real question for California college sports fans heading into this season: what does regional rivalry even mean anymore. USC and UCLA still share a city, a recruiting base and, for football, a conference. But the West Coast college athletics ecosystem has been rewired from scratch, and neither program can fall back on the geographic identity that used to define them.