College football opened the 2026 season with Week 0 on Saturday. USC was one of the featured teams, hosting San Jose State in a 42-26 win. That and the rest of the stat sheet weren’t what everyone was talking about after the game, though. It was the attendance inside the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
USC announced a crowd of 51,144, the lowest of the Lincoln Riley era and the program’s smallest announced attendance since 2018. Even that number drew its fair share of skepticism after television shots showed entire sections of the Coliseum sitting nearly empty.
The explanations came quickly. Temperatures climbed into the mid-90s with a heat index above 100 degrees. The 12:30 p.m. local kickoff offered little relief from the sun, and San Jose State — a Mountain West conference member — wasn’t exactly the kind of opponent expected to drive Southern California fans through the gates.
USC acknowledged the situation a day later.
USC Responds After Sparse Coliseum Crowd
“We understand the factors that impacted Saturday’s attendance,” USC said in a statement to USA Today’s Jordan Mendoza.
The school added that it has “high expectations and a premier home schedule” and expects increased attendance during the rest of the season.
USA Today’s Matt Hayes wasn’t buying the explanations.
Hayes estimated USC may have played in front of only around 20,000 fans and pointed to a rather inconvenient comparison from the program’s own history.
“Meanwhile, back in the real world when USC was relevant and successful — you know, like a top-three program in all of college football should be — the Trojans had 84,325 fans for the season opener in 2009 against San Jose State. At 12:30 p.m., with weather in the 90s,” Hayes wrote.
“The difference, you ask? One coach (Pete Carroll) had a track record of winning big and filling the joint.”
Carroll’s Trojans were ranked No. 4 at the time and coming off seven consecutive Pac-10 championships. USC beat San Jose State 56-3 that afternoon.
Hayes made it clear that the current version of USC hasn’t earned that same level of enthusiasm under Riley. The Trojans haven’t reached the College Football Playoff during his first four seasons, and even a 9-3 finish in 2025 did little to completely erase the disappointment surrounding the previous years.
Dave Portnoy Questions USC’s Top-Tier Status
Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy took the criticism another step further Monday.
Portnoy posted video of the sparse crowd and argued that an elite college football program simply can’t open a season in that kind of environment, regardless of the opponent or weather.
“The crowd for the USC opener was an absolute disgrace. You can’t consider them a tier one college football program if that’s how you open the season,” Portnoy wrote on X.
He also dismissed the heat and early kickoff as adequate excuses and suggested the atmosphere could even matter when elite recruits are deciding where they want to play.
USC will have opportunities to make Saturday look like an aberration.
The Trojans host Fresno State on Friday night before a home schedule that eventually brings Oregon, Washington and Ohio State to the Coliseum for Big 10 action. Those games should draw more interest from fans than a Week 0 meeting with San Jose State.
But that is also part of the problem Hayes was pointing toward.
USC didn’t always need a marquee opponent to fill the Coliseum. Back in 2009, their brand was a much larger draw.
Seventeen years later, the empty seats became a bigger story than USC’s first win of the season.