Gavin Meyer's portal patience has paid off for USC in its defensive makeover

The window was quickly closing last May, the pool of available transfers nearly set for next season, and Lincoln Riley had yet to land the interior lineman he and USC’s defense still desperately needed.

Damonic Williams, one of the top young defensive tackles in the Big 12, was headed to Oklahoma. Derick Harmon, a 320-pound behemoth previously at Michigan State, chose Oregon. Within two days in May, two of the most coveted tackles in the transfer portal were out of reach. Others were finding homes fast. Time was running out to find a fit.

For Gavin Meyer, though, there was no real hurry. The Wyoming grad transfer had waited until the last possible moment to enter the portal, just barely beating the May 1 deadline. In part because he was graduating that week in Laramie, Wyo., where he’d spent the last four years. But also Meyer understood his circumstances made finding the right situation especially important. He didn’t want to just be a depth piece added to some defense at the eleventh hour.

“I think that’s 100% in people’s thoughts in the transfer portal,” Meyer said. “You have to find your right fit. There’s so many things that go into that. With players on the team, how many guys they have on the team, but also the coaching staff. As long as you’re in the portal and you have the right intentions, a lot of people see through a lot of stuff.”

USC had already added a transfer tackle in January, Isaiah Raikes, just to see him jump ship after spring. No matter how perilously thin the Trojans were on the interior, Riley didn’t want to add for the sake of adding, either.

The previous cycle had been “a good reminder,” Riley said later, of how adding a poor fit from the portal could be “one of the most damaging things you can do.” This time, he and his USC staff were intent on “bringing in the right guys from the portal, not just the right body types or right experience level.”

In Meyer, Riley and his new defensive coordinator, D’Anton Lynn, felt right away they’d found a combination of all three. Even if he’d never had the chance to prove it at the power conference level.

“He was one of the very, very few,” Riley said, “who checked all the boxes for us.”

USC is looking like a potential playoff team while UCLA is still trying to get on its feet.

Meyer has so far delivered on that initial confidence, even unexpectedly unseating the Trojans incumbent, all-conference defensive tackle, Bear Alexander, to earn a starting spot through the first two weeks. During that time, Meyer and Alexander have rotated evenly at tackle, playing roughly the same number of snaps (Meyer’s 49 to Alexander’s 48). But where Meyer has earned universal early acclaim from coaches, the tone surrounding Alexander has been decidedly different since he sat out most of spring nursing an injury.

While Riley has praised his progress, the coach also made note before the season how Alexander “is still very young on the football field.”

“Bear has a long ways to go,” he said.

Meyer, meanwhile, made clear to Lynn upon first meeting him that he’d have no trouble picking up the Trojans new defensive scheme. For more than an hour on his visit, they talked about the finer points of defense, while Lynn rolled tape, peppering Meyer with questions.

“We’re talking Xs and O’s, concepts,” Meyer said. “He’s asking me, ‘What do you see here? What do you see here?’ And we’re going back and forth, back and forth on all that stuff.”

It was an eye-opening exchange for Meyer.

“That was the moment when I was like, ‘Yep, sounds about right,’” Meyer said. “Everything I’d heard about him and how he perceives the game of football was exactly how I see it.”

And in Meyer, Lynn saw something USC’s defense was desperately missing a season ago: a consistent presence on the interior.

It didn’t matter that he’d arrived on campus only this summer. Or that his experience at Wyoming was spent primarily in a part-time role.

“From the very first practice, he was just on it,” Lynn said. “From the fronts, the adjustments, the pressures, seeing how he picked it up that fast was super impressive.”

Meyer’s role on the interior should only prove more integral from here, with Michigan, the defending national champs, looming next Saturday and a slate of beefy Big Ten fronts fast approaching after that.

But so far, the fit at USC has been everything he — and his coaches — could have hoped for, considering how late they’d found each other.

“Just in the perfect place,” Meyer said with a smile. “The perfect place to get better.”