The Times of Troy: Examining the influence Carol Folt had on USC athletics

Hello, everyone! I’m Ryan Kartje, the USC beat writer at the L.A. Times, and welcome to another week of the Times of Troy newsletter, where there’s no shortage of topics to discuss to fill your bye week void. You may have heard there’s a new quarterback at the helm for USC football. But for this week’s newsletter, we’re talking about the other big news at USC this week: The impending retirement of USC President Carol Folt — and the legacy she leaves behind with Trojan athletics.

Twenty four hours before she announced her retirement, Carol Folt stood for a photo behind a ceremonial pile of dirt where construction is starting on the school’s state-of-the-art football facility.

The groundbreaking of the Bloom Football Performance Center on Thursday was, in many ways, a culminating moment for Folt. Since the start of her tenure in the summer of 2019, she’d made reshaping Trojan athletics a top priority, touting it publicly as central to her vision. She’d already overseen the resignations of two athletic directors, one of which she’d hired, the hiring of a $10-million-per-year football coach and the remaking of a department reeling from the Varsity Blues scandal. It was Folt, too, who closed the door on Pac-12 expansion, only to lead USC to the Big Ten Conference less than a year later.

The $200-million, 160,000 square-foot facility will be among her most significant stamps on the school’s campus when it opens in summer 2026, a gleaming testament to her “moonshot” vision to transform Trojan athletics.

“For every single opportunity,” Folt said, smiling from the dais Thursday, “[it’s] a little corny, but the moon is getting a little closer to USC athletics.”

A day later, Folt announced she will retire in July 2025, at the end of the current academic year. When she does, she’ll leave behind a complicated legacy at the university, having both equally calmed a scandal-plagued institution and also served as a lightning rod for scrutiny.

The same could be said of her influence on USC athletics. When Folt first took over, in July 2019, the department had not only been rocked by scandal, but also plagued by a decade of insularity and stagnation. It desperately needed to change. And Folt stepped in, determined to make waves immediately.

Those sweeping efforts to reshape USC’s image didn’t always land among longtime employees in athletics, who felt she balked too often at USC’s deep traditions. Two former university administrators told me that, upon taking the job, Folt voiced her disapproval of the famed university slogan, “Fight on!” She went so far as to have staffers engage university officials about phasing it out because it was “contentious” — a request that, one official explained, “went over like a lead balloon.”

But within two months of taking over, she initiated sweeping change within the department, forcing out embattled athletic director Lynn Swann. Three longtime senior athletics officials were ousted soon after, sending a clear message within USC athletics that Folt planned to put her own stamp on the department.

Not everyone in athletics embraced that message. Especially those who took issue with how the sudden departure of longtime athletics officials Steve Lopes, Ron Orr and Scott Jacobson was handled within the office.

But Folt had already charted a new direction for athletics by replacing Swann, a former Trojan football hero, with Mike Bohn, the first outsider to helm the department in a quarter century. At the time, in November 2019, she lauded Bohn as a man of “real integrity,” a leader who could help guide USC athletics out of a dark era.

USC invested heavily to deliver on that promise, as Folt made aggressive moves to secure its football future. Most notably she signed off in November 2021 on hiring coveted football coach Lincoln Riley, a move that cost USC upwards of $10 million per year, one of the largest salaries in all of college athletics. Folt even promised to fund the construction of what would become the Bloom Football Performance Center in order to lure Riley to campus.

At the time, it felt like a worthy investment to turn Trojan football around. But USC is 12-10 in its last two seasons under Riley, and it’s fair to wonder how a new president might view the massive amount of money still to be paid to the football coach.

Folt made a more shrewd calculus at the conference level soon after hiring Riley as coach. As part of a committee exploring expansion with the Pac-12, Folt had already stood up against the idea of expanding the conference. The following summer, she would turn around and help engineer USC’s move to the Big Ten, a move that would usher in the end of the Pac-12 as we knew it.

While USC made no friends in the Pac-12, this seemed like a banner stretch for Bohn — and, by extension, Folt — so much so that she gave the athletic director a lucrative contract extension. But behind the scenes, the athletic department was falling into disarray under Bohn’s leadership. Folt eventually hired an attorney specializing in sexual harassment to conduct a review of the department. And in May 2023, after learning of the review, I sent Bohn and Folt questions regarding concerns I’d heard about Bohn’s conduct and management of the department.

Bohn resigned the next day. Folt never answered questions about Bohn, chief among them how USC had overlooked a lengthy history of concerns that followed him through previous jobs. When Times columnist Dylan Hernández approached her after a news conference and tried to pose those questions, her office ended the interview and accused The Times of being “sexist.”

She is poised to ride that silence into retirement.

Folt hired Jennifer Cohen, the university’s first female athletic director, to replace Bohn in August 2023. And after more than a year at the helm, Cohen appears to have stabilized USC’s athletic department. But now, as a $200-million facility is erected on campus, the specter of revenue sharing — and the extra $20 million per year it will cost — looms in the not-so-distant future. How USC plans to pay for it all is still very much up in the air.

That’s now a problem for another president. Certainly, no one can say with a straight face that Folt didn’t spend enough to reshape USC athletics. But as construction continues and the campus moves on, only time will tell what the imprint she left will look down the line.

Extra points … QB edition

USC quarterback Jayden Maiava gets set to pass in a September game.

(Mark J. Terrill / Associated Press)

—Riley says he doesn’t expect USC’s offense to change much with Jayden Maiava. Though, for USC’s sake, I have to assume he’s not telling the whole truth there. Maiava is a full four inches taller than Miller Moss and weighs at least 25 pounds more. He has a “cannon arm” capable of “throwing the ball all over the field,” according to his teammates. And he has a year of experience as a dual threat option, running an RPO-based offense. But where Maiava should be most different from Moss is in his ability to make plays off-schedule, improvising when things break down. That skill set should put him more in line with Heisman winner Caleb Williams than Moss, which should be music to USC fans’ ears.

—Expect Miller Moss to land with a strong program next season. Just because Moss was replaced doesn’t mean he’s not capable of being a solid power conference starter. Riley didn’t do him any favors with an offense that, three times, asked him to throw 50 passes in a game. Moss has made his fair share of stellar throws this season. But he doesn’t have the arm to heave it deep, and USC simply asked him to do too much to elevate its offense. A chance of scenery should do him good.

—You may have seen Ja’Kobi Lane’s reaction to Moss’ benching. The sophomore receiver, and close friend of Moss, made his displeasure with the decision known, posting on social media that he was “cooked,” before putting the blame for USC’s offensive issues on the Trojans’ offensive line. At one point, he was asked if he’d “miss Riley” and he responded by saying “no” with an expletive. Yikes. It was a moment of immaturity for Lane, who quickly deleted the posts. Lane later said on social media that he has no intention of leaving USC because Moss lost the starting job. But we’ll see how he adjusts with a new quarterback, who’s not his close friend, at the helm.

—Maiava will be the first Polynesian quarterback to start at USC. Which, given the history of Polynesian Trojan stars, is truly baffling. He’ll face off with Nebraska’s Dylan Raiola, another quarterback of Polynesian descent.

Big Ten best bet, Week 12

Washington (-3.5) vs. UCLA

DeShaun Foster has figured something out during the past three weeks, and UCLA has won three in a row because of it. But Washington is a different team at home, as USC found out a few weeks ago. After two losses in three weeks, we’re counting on UCLA coming up short in what should be a close game.

In case you missed it

USC benches Miller Moss in favor of Jayden Maiava, who will start against Nebraska

JuJu Watkins and No. 3 USC dominate in win over Cal Poly San Luis Obispo

Josh Cohen and Saint Thomas help lift USC to narrow win over Idaho State

How Jayden Maiava remained ready to seize the USC quarterback job

With JuJu Watkins leading a star-studded roster, USC has high expectations

USC men’s basketball out to defy expectations in Year 1 of Eric Musselman era

What I’m Watching This Week

A scene from “Yellowjackets” season two.

(Kailey Schwerman / SHOWTIME)

“Yellowjackets” has been around for a few years, but the first season is now available on Netflix, and I am currently obsessed. The show follows a high school girls soccer team that gets into a plane crash on its way to nationals and has to figure out how to survive. At some point, some of them are saved — as evidenced by flash forwards to them as adults — but what happened to the other girls who aren’t in the current-day story line is still a mystery.