Lincoln Riley recruited Malachi Nelson at Oklahoma. When he left the Sooners to take over at USC, he asked Nelson to trust him and follow him. USC fought off a push from Texas A&M prior to signing day and, when it was all said and done, felt like it had the heir apparent to Caleb Williams.

A year after his signing, Riley and the offensive staff are back to the drawing board, left without the quarterback expected to take them into the post-Williams era and into the Big Ten. Nelson is entering the transfer portal.

He completed one pass for the Trojans.

“That part’s difficult. The old-school in all of us has all the great memories of the guys that we coach that maybe weren’t ready in the beginning and they progressed and got better and you got to see the end of that,” Riley told reporters on Monday when asked if it was hard to see Nelson hit the portal before USC even really got to see him in action. “So, yeah, it’s just part of it now. … Sure, you’d love every guy to come through and be able to see it through, but that’s just not the reality right now.”

Nelson spent the first year of his college career recovering from surgery to his non-throwing arm. He played in one game and, after a shaky debut in the USC Spring Game, was never able to catch Miller Moss for the No. 2 job behind Williams.

With Riley going shopping in the portal for a quarterback and USC heavily linked to Kansas State transfer Will Howard, it seemed like a matter of time before Nelson explored his options.

In February of this year, The Athletic’s Max Olson looked at top-50 quarterbacks who signed with a program between the 2017 and 2020 classes and didn’t start a game within their first two years of school. Olson found that 87% of those players transferred.

And that situation only seems to be growing more volatile. Seven of the top 13 quarterbacks in the 2022 signing class have already transferred.

Three of the top seven quarterbacks in the 2023 signing class have already gone into the transfer portal.

The No. 3 quarterback in the class — UCLA’s Dante Moore — started five games as a true freshman and still left the team anyway. He didn’t experience a coaching change like Aidan Chiles at Oregon State and he wasn’t recruited over like Nelson may have perceived he was.

“There’s some parts of it that I don’t know are necessarily great for the game,” Riley said of quarterback recruiting in this era. “But we’ve all got the rules right now, we all know what you can do and what you can’t do, and we’ve all got to make do with it. We’ll continue to be a great place to come play quarterback.”

Riley said his philosophical approach to high school recruiting has changed a bit because of the prevalence of NIL in recruiting and the ease with which players can transfer between schools.

Sometimes, though, it just comes down to whether a player is willing to show patience.

“You want to have guys that are hungry to get on the field right away, but also guys that have a mind to be developed and have a good sense of reality,” Riley said. “We’ve always felt like development was one of the hallmarks of our program, one of the strengths that we have. But the other half of that is you have to have people that are willing to hang in there and go through what it really takes to develop and become a really good player at this level.”