Even In Exile, Reggie Bush Remains USC's Best Recruiting Tool

On a mid-morning in late September, the Los Angeles media asked then-USC head coach Steve Sarkisian who sophomore Adoree' Jackson, his team's most exciting player, reminded him of.

It was a valid question. Every year, the Trojans' roster is loaded with five-star recruits but none of them gleamed quite like Jackson. A true triple threat, Jackson lines up at receiver and running back on offense; cornerback and safety on defense; he returns both kicks and punts and also hopes to qualify for the Olympics in the long jump. The weekend before Sarkisian was asked the question, Jackson had ignited a 42-14 rout against Arizona State by scoring an 80-yard touchdown reception less than five minutes into the game. He finished the day with 184 all-purpose yards on just five touches, on top of playing a full load of defensive snaps.

There are not many easy comparisons for a player like this. Nobody covering the team had seen anything quite like Jackson before. But Sarkisian had.

"There's about one guy I could compare him to," Sarkisian smirked. "And I'm not allowed to say his name around here."

Ten years after his last game at USC, hardly anyone in the Trojans athletic department utters the name "Reggie Bush." His Heisman was long ago shipped out of Heritage Hall and no one bothered to waste a mold on a plaque of him for a recently erected wall of football All-Americans. No USC player since Bush has worn the number five, but his jersey has remained conspicuously absent from the school's ring of Heisman winners for years. All that remains of him are his records in the school's annual media guide, an asterisk tacked onto every milestone. He has, for all intents and purposes, been erased.

Except, that is, where he matters most. By the close of business today, USC will wind up signing one of the country's best recruiting classes. They'll do so because they have everything to offer—tradition, academics, facilities and warm weather. But, perhaps more than anything else, their foremost advantage lies in something they can never overtly sell: the legacy Bush left behind. A generation of kids now of high school age grew up watching Bush dazzle week after week at the Coliseum.

Even UCLA head coach Jim Mora has acknowledged the potency of Bush's staying power. In 2014 the Trojans snagged nine of California's top 25 recruits compared to just two for UCLA, including three of the four best players in the state. UCLA was coming off a second consecutive blowout victory against their city rivals. And it didn't matter. "We're still fighting the years and years of great teams that Southern Cal had," Mora sighed. "A lot of these kids in the area grew up watching Reggie Bush and the other greats."

Jackson was the best talent in the area that year, as well as in the state of California. He graduated from Serra High School in Gardena, California, about 10 miles south of USC's campus. But he was born in Belleville, Illinois, and only moved to Los Angeles in high school in order to take on better competition. He came to California—and USC—to emulate a player he may never met while he's in college.

"When I first started playing football, my favorite player [was] called Reggie Bush," Jackson said on Signing Day 2014, when asked why he chose USC. "And that's who I wanted to be like. That's who I try to [model] my game around. Now, I just want to put SC back on the map like he did and turn the program around."

While Jackson's formal commitment to USC came at the very end of the recruiting period, his love for Bush was evident from the beginning. He chose a photo of Bush in his USC uniform as his Twitter avatar, and rumors swirled that he could be the first player since Bush to inherit the fabled number five. (Jackson ended up wearing number two instead).

By now, writers on the recruiting beat know the drill: Whenever they ask player what he knows about USC, Reggie Bush's name soon follows.

"Really, it's kind of amazing," says Chris Swanson, the publisher of TrojanSports.com (full disclosure: I used to work there). "I think it would have been expected the first five years but these kids are so far removed from Reggie Bush's time and he's still something that's brought up really on a regular basis."

"Honestly, every single kid says it," echoes Greg Biggins, Scout.com West's Coast Analyst.

To be fair, Bush is hardly the lone iconic figure from his era at USC. Biggins hears Matt Leinart brought up almost as often, and Pete Carroll's back-to-back Super Bowl appearances bolster his own complicated Trojan legacy. Yet Bush is still a phenomenon unto himself, even if his NFL career has mostly been seen as a disappointment.

"He was so different," Trevon Sidney, a consensus four-star wide receiver recruit in this year's USC class, says. "There was no one like him. Like Matt Leinart—yeah, there were other good quarterbacks. But there was no one like Reggie."

"That's the player you identify with USC," Swanson says. "[When you say] 'OK, who is the best player in the Pete Carroll run? That seven-year run?' That's Reggie Bush. That's what everybody thinks. Even if they were born and only watched the 2007 and 2008 teams, they still think Reggie Bush."

Today's USC recruits are the kids whose first football memories were of Bush tumbling in for a touchdown against UCLA and cutting back against the grain versus Fresno State. Pick a relevant USC target and you'll find story, after story, after story, after story mentioning Bush.

To this day, there's a note of pride in Sidney's voice when he recalls playing for the Pasadena Trojans in youth football, back when he was a running back; naturally he, too, wore number five. His recruiting classmate, four-star offensive lineman Frank Martin, never stopped calling Bush his hero.

"Growing up, watching him on TV, everyone wanted to be like Reggie," Martin says. "He was just that guy. He was Mr. Cool." Nothing has changed, for him or his fellow USC signees. They're still talking about Reggie Bush. And, Martin says, "Everyone still thinks he's the greatest of all time."

Even the players who were only toddlers during the Bush era still mention those glory years.

"I'm talking to juniors," Biggins says. "Now, these guys are four years old [when he played] and they're still saying 'USC, Reggie Bush, Matt Leinart.'"

Which seems impossible, but the idea of Bush supersedes even his most outrageous on-field exploits. USC legends regularly turn up at practices and games, but Bush cannot, and so no one in Troy will see him age or gray. Until he does, he'll eternally remain 21 years old there, slaloming past defenders and scooting into the end zone. The magnitude of his presence only grows in his absence, and perhaps as a function of it.

"I think that the reason people talk about him a lot is that legend aura, that legend type of thing that goes around him and he's not around us," says USC right tackle Zach Banner. "It's like Bigfoot. Everybody wants to talk about him and sometimes people have said that they've seen him. But we kind of wish we saw him around a lot more."

In December, USC experienced its first Bigfoot sighting in more than half a decade when Bush showed up at the Pac-12 Championship in Levi's Stadium, the only possible venue for a reunion due to an NCAA loophole that allows an NFL player—Bush played last season with the 49ers—to be in his home stadium at any time.

Even still, USC covered its bases and claimed that Bush showed up on his own. Nevertheless, just before the Trojans took on Stanford, Reggie Bush was again inside USC's locker room.

The visit itself was short-lived. A USC spokesman claimed Bush merely "poked his head in." Wide receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster, whom Bush hugged, remembers a hush filling the room more than any kind of celebration. Banner, who was midway through his pre-game routine, was among the many who didn't walk over at all.

Like everything with Bush, though, the moment was amplified because of the circumstances. As is his custom with anything USC-related, Bush did not discuss the incident afterward. (A request for comment for this story went unreturned by Bush's agent.) There's no telling when the NCAA will allow the university to formally associate itself again with him, or how open Bush would ultimately be to the idea should it happen. The eternal 21-year-old turns 31 next month. That brief foray into the locker room may be the last time he's seen around a USC team until he's 41, or 51. He still hasn't stepped foot on campus.

But he will always be a part of USC, regardless of the exile. Last summer, Biggins covered the commitment ceremony of Thomas Graham, a senior in next year's class who ranks as one of the best cornerbacks in the country. After Graham verbally committed to USC, his father recalled how Thomas was "such a big Reggie Bush fan, he wore a jersey every day until the numbers came off."

Soon, there will be players who only know of Bush's college career through YouTube mixes and family stories. Even then, Biggins has an idea of who their favorite Trojan will be. Ideas are tough to kill, after all.

"I think people are going to be saying 'Reggie Bush' for a long time."