USC football news: Stewart Mandel calls out fans blaming crowd on Notre Dame

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The USC football season may have begun with a win vs. San Jose State, but the Trojans have been deemed losers by many on the internet after a particularly sparse crowd at the Los Angeles Coliseum.

Although the attendance was announced as 51,000, there were obviously far, far fewer fans in the stands Saturday, and it did not go unnoticed.

The Athletic’s Stewart Mandel posted an image of the USC attendance on X, formerly Twitter, and wrote, “Didn’t realize USC’s spring game was today.”

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That sparked debate among fans — Trojan and non-Trojan — about the reasons for the relatively few people going to USC’s season opener. Mandel, though, said he did not “blame a single person for staying home.”

“USC exited a 100-year-old rivalry with a national contender (ND) and replaced it with Week 0 vs. San Jose State,” Mandel wrote. “That’s reason enough.”

When a USC fan responded and said that USC offered Notre Dame the game that San Jose State eventually filled, Mandel wrote that “Lincoln Riley’s biggest win at SC so far was convincing (some of) their fans it’s actually ND’s fault.”

“The game didn’t *need* to be moved. There was no scheduling conflict. Riley/USC wanted to make life easier on themselves, ND didn’t play along, and now a 100-year rivalry is on hiatus for 4 years,” he wrote.

USC and Notre Dame, who have played 96 times since their first meeting in 1926, are not scheduled to play one another again until 2030. The game will be each team’s season openers in 2030 and 2031, and it will be played within the first three weeks of the season in 2032 and 2033.

For much of the past decade, Notre Dame has dominated the rivalry; since 2011, the Irish have won 10 of 13 meetings (including two games that have been officially vacated). This has come after a decade of dominance for the Trojans, who won eight straight from 2002 to 2009 and nine of 10 from 2002 to 2011.

USC will be back in action at the Coliseum on Friday vs. Fresno State, while Notre Dame plays Wisconsin on Sunday at Lambeau Field in Green Bay.

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