The transfer window closed quickly last May, the pool of available transfers was almost set for next season, and Lincoln Riley had not yet found the center back he and USC’s defense still desperately needed.
Damonic Williams, one of the Big 12’s best young defensive tackles, went to Oklahoma. Derick Harmon, a 320-pound behemoth who was previously at Michigan State, chose Oregon. Within two days in May, two of the most coveted tackles were no longer available in the transfer portal. Others quickly found homes. Time to find a suitable player was running out.
For Gavin Meyer, however, there was no real rush. The Wyoming graduate had waited until the last possible moment to enter the portal, barely making the May 1 deadline. Partly because he was graduating that week from Laramie, Wyoming, where he had spent the past four years. But Meyer also knew that his circumstances made it especially important to find the right situation. He didn’t want to just serve as a last-minute substitute on some defense.
“I think that’s 100% in the minds of people in the transfer portal,” Meyer said. “You have to find the right fit for you. So many things come into play. With the players on the team, how many people they have on the team, but also with 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.”
USC had already signed a transfer tackle, Isaiah Raikes, in January, only to see him jump ship in the spring. No matter how dangerously thin the Trojans were on the interior, Riley wasn’t about to just sign anyone, either.
The previous cycle was “a good reminder,” Riley later said, that bringing in an unsuitable player from the portal can be “one of the most damaging things you can do.” This time, he and his USC team were careful to “bring the right guys out of the portal, not just the ones with the right build or the right experience level.”
Riley and his new defensive coordinator D’Anton Lynn immediately felt they had found a combination of all three qualities in Meyer, even though he never had the chance to prove it at the power conference level.
“He was one of the very, very few,” Riley said, “who met all of our criteria.”
Meyer has lived up to that initial trust so far, even unexpectedly unseating the Trojans’ reigning all-conference defensive tackle Bear Alexander to earn a spot in the starting lineup for the first two weeks. During that time, Meyer and Alexander have rotated evenly at the tackle position and played roughly the same number of snaps (Meyer 49 to Alexander 48). But while Meyer received general praise from the coaches early on, the tone around Alexander has been decidedly different since he sat out most of the spring with an injury.
While Riley praised his progress, the coach also noted before the season that Alexander “is still very young on the football field.”
“Bear still has a long way to go,” he said.
Meyer, meanwhile, made it clear to Lynn during his first meeting that he would have no problem understanding the Trojans’ new defensive scheme. For more than an hour during his visit, they talked about the intricacies of the defense while Lynn played the tape and peppered Meyer with questions.
“We talk about Xs and O’s, about concepts,” Meyer said. “He asks me, ‘What do you see here? What do you see here?’ And we discuss all of this over and over again.”
For Meyer, it was an eye-opening exchange.
“That was the moment when I thought, ‘Yep, that sounds right,'” Meyer said. “Everything I had heard about him and how he perceived the game of football was exactly what I saw.”
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And in Meyer, Lynn saw something that USC’s defense desperately lacked a season ago: a consistent presence on the interior.
It didn’t matter that he had only arrived on campus in the summer or that he had spent most of his time in Wyoming working part-time.
“From the first practice, he was just totally into it,” Lynn said. “From the fronts, the adjustments, the pressure – to see how quickly he caught on was super impressive.”
Meyer’s role on the interior should prove even more important from now on, with Michigan, the defending national champion, coming next Saturday and a number of muscular Big Ten front teams quickly approaching after that.
But so far, the collaboration with USC has exceeded everything he – and his coaches – had hoped for, considering how late they found each other.
“Simply in the perfect place,” said Meyer with a smile. “The perfect place to get healthy.”
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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
