L.A. Olympics will likely force USC football to

Since it first opened in 1923, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum has been the only real home of USC football. No major sports activities staff in the town’s historical past has performed in the same venue for longer.

But after more than a century spent in the town’s iconic stadium, The Times has discovered that the 2028 Summer Olympics and Paralympic Games will likely force USC to discover a new home for its football staff in 2028, with the likeliest option being SoFi Stadium in Inglewood.

Multiple people with data of the state of affairs not licensed to focus on it publicly told The Times that the Coliseum wouldn’t be prepared for the start of faculty football season in September 2028 because of the $100-million momentary monitor that’s being constructed on top of the Coliseum discipline to host the track-and-field competitors at the L.A. Olympics and Paralympic Games.

The logistics are still being labored out with L.A. 2028, and USC has not made a ultimate determination about where the Trojans’ 2028 football season will be performed. A source said the college hasn’t formally decided whether or not the Coliseum discipline might be prepared later in the autumn, maybe to host a portion of USC’s 2028 home schedule. But even if it’s logistically doable, it’s not clear that USC’s athletic division would discover that association in its best curiosity, given it will imply uprooting the staff midseason or spending a long stretch of the 2028 slate away from L.A.

“USC and LA28 are working in lockstep on all logistics for the Olympic and Paralympic Games,” USC athletics spokesperson Cody Worsham said in a assertion. “We will share details with the public when they are finalized.”

SoFi Stadium officers declined to remark when requested about USC’s doable transfer to the venue in 2028.

With the closing ceremonies of the Paralympic Games set for Aug. 27, 2028, there could be just two weeks for the momentary monitor to be eliminated and the grass discipline below to be restored forward of USC’s at present scheduled 2028 home opener on Sept. 9. Multiple people told The Times that’s not a possible timeline for a construction LA28 chairman Casey Wasserman once called “the most expensive and probably complicated thing we actually have to build” forward of the 2028 Games.

This isn’t a new downside at USC. Discussions about the plausibility of the football program sharing the Coliseum with the Olympics in 2028 hint back properly before current athletic director Jennifer Cohen was employed in 2023. The perception at one level, according to a particular person acquainted with those discussions, was that with some intelligent scheduling, USC would only have to miss a home sport or two.

Now, according to a number of people acquainted with the state of affairs, USC is anticipated to spend the 2028 season at SoFi Stadium, which hosts the NFL’s Rams and Chargers. By that level, it could also be the home discipline of the town’s other Big Ten football staff.

UCLA has already acknowledged it plans to commerce the Rose Bowl, where it has performed since 1982, for the fashionable SoFi Stadium, in spite of a lease settlement that runs through 2044. The metropolis of Pasadena and the Rose Bowl Operating Company have since sued the college and SoFi Stadium’s possession in hopes of blocking the Bruins’ transfer.

If UCLA forges on with plans to abandon the Rose Bowl in 2026 for SoFi, all 4 of the town’s major football groups might be taking part in under the same roof two years later.

Those logistics, however, pale in comparability to what it will take to host Olympic monitor and discipline at the Coliseum in 2028, in the same stadium where the competitors was held virtually a century earlier. The greatest impediment LA28 confronted utilizing an iconic venue that hosted the 1984 Olympics is that there wasn’t enough room on the Coliseum ground for an Olympic-sized monitor.

Renovations in the early Nineteen Nineties added 14 rows of seats at the underside of the bowl, shrinking the dimensions of the Coliseum discipline. The answer requires set up of a monitor 11 ft above the sphere that stretches over the first few rows of stadium seating to met Olympic requirements.

To construct the momentary monitor, the Coliseum’s turf and the dust beneath it will be scraped away, down to the stadium’s concrete base where columns will be positioned about every 10 ft. That construction at the Coliseum is anticipated to start immediately after the Trojans end their home football schedule someday in November 2027.

Bill Hanway, the chief vice president for AECOM — the infrastructure consulting firm employed to oversee LA28’s preparations — told The Times in June 2024 that the monitor was “an incredibly complex build” in “an incredibly tight space.”

Taking monitor down will be its own problem, one that will take longer than the two-week window between the end of the Games and the start of USC’s 2028 slate. When a comparable construction was constructed for the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, Scotland, the soccer staff that performed in the stadium — Queen’s Park FC — didn’t return for more than a 12 months.

Unless that timeline may be slashed, the Trojans will spend the 2028 season switching off Saturdays with their rivals, who, for one 12 months, could be across-the-hallway as opposed to across city.

USC and UCLA shared the Coliseum for 54 years before the Bruins moved to the Rose Bowl in 1982. For 33 of those years, the Coliseum also hosted the Rams on Sundays.

If that feels too crowded to USC, the Rose Bowl is the only other option in city — and all of the sudden appears to be in critical need of a tenant.

But as of now, according to a particular person acquainted with the state of affairs, SoFi Stadium is the only venue that’s been mentioned as a potential momentary home.