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LOS ANGELES — It had been a Signing Day of disappointment USC simply couldn’t afford, watching four- and five-star players turn elsewhere, watching an important defensive coach leave at the worst possible time.
And then, in a snap, USC’s 2025 class suddenly found a balance.
Down in Louisiana, after weeks of pushing for another Southern commit who seemed destined to stay at home or travel up to the Pacific Northwest, five-star defensive lineman Jahkeem “Thanos” Stewart tugged on a USC cap and declared he was signing with the Trojans.
It’s a program-altering get for head coach Lincoln Riley and defensive line coach Eric Henderson, the kind of bona-fide talent in the trenches that USC’s been missing for three years in Riley’s rebuild.
At the end of October, with USC’s defensive line mounting feeble pressure in its four-man rush and its group of pass rushers sitting with but a few sacks, Riley made it clear it’d be a priority for the Trojans to pursue edge talent who could win one-on-one matchups against linemen and powerful interior tackles who could affect opposing pockets up the middle.
“I don’t know that there’s any position we spend more time recruiting on than the guys on the defensive front,” Riley said then.
In Stewart, a 6-foot-6, 270-pound force who played his senior season at Edna Karr High, USC has a talent that could develop into both – Stewart projectable both off the edge and at defensive tackle, a hand-in-Thanos-gauntlet fit for Henderson’s versatile scheme up front. The only question for Stewart, ultimately, is whether he has the reps in high school to make an immediate impact: He reclassified from the 2026 to 2025 class this fall, taking in limited experience to USC’s program.
Still, it’s a massive boost to USC’s national-recruiting efforts, as the Trojans and Henderson beat out LSU, Oregon and more to land the five-star force.
