USC’s opener against San Jose State last weekend did more than leave empty seats behind the end zone. It turned into a national punch line, with Stewart Mandel posting a screenshot on X and joking, “Didn’t realize USC’s spring game was today.”
The crowd became a talking point because it was impossible to miss. Joey McGuire was among the college football figures piling on, and the reaction spread fast enough that a routine season opener began to look like a referendum on how much interest USC can still command. Matt Leinart may be the keyword people are searching now, but the real story is the same one the empty seats told: this was not a crowd that looked eager to see the Trojans.
Some USC fans blamed the heat, and that likely mattered on a hot day. But heat alone does not explain why a program in a pro sports-heavy market can struggle to fill a stadium when college teams are at best the fourth- or fifth-biggest draw in town. USC is also carrying the drag of three straight mediocre years under Lincoln Riley, and that has sapped local excitement in a place where attention is split across far more than one team.
That is why the comparison that came up from Stanford mattered too. On Saturday, Stanford played Hawaii in front of an announced crowd of 23,222. The number was not just a count of seats sold; it showed how thin the margin can be for schools that do not have a built-in crowd ready to show up for any opponent, any time. USC and Stanford are unusual cases, but they are useful ones because they sit in markets where casual interest is already hard to win.
There is also a scheduling problem underneath the crowd shots. USC added San Jose State late last year after Lincoln Riley begged out of the Trojans’ semiannual Thanksgiving weekend date with Notre Dame, and the wider trend around the sport points in the same direction. Marquee programs have been canceling upcoming home-and-homes over the past year or so, while keeping the G6 and FCS games that are easier to sell to athletic departments and harder to sell to fans.
Marty put the issue bluntly in a mailbag question, asking whether the empty-seats stories from Week 0 should be a wake-up call for schools scheduling unappealing matchups, especially when TV dictates awkward kickoff times and the cost of going to games keeps rising. The uncomfortable answer for USC is that the heat may explain part of last weekend, but it does not explain all of it. If a blueblood cannot count on its own people to show up for a late-added home game, the problem is bigger than weather, and the next school to trim its schedule may hear the same message from its own empty sections.
