How Stanford contributed to the craziest college football offseason ever

Stanford kicked off what was the craziest offseason that college football has ever seen

There will be college football games played this weekend, but the talk of the town is still this past offseason.

It will easily go down as one of the craziest few months that the sport has ever seen, as there was just an epic chain of events that led to the current state we are in. Up until this point, arguably the most impactful event to impact the entirety of college football was Kirby Smart starting Jake Fromm over Justin Fields leading to him ( Fields) transferring to Ohio State. 

ESPN's Adam Rittenberg and Alex Scarborough decided to chart the offseason moves that now have us looking at a revamped USC, quarterbacks from all over the country at new schools, and some of the sports top head coaches at new jobs. 

Of course a lot of these moves had little top nothing to do with Stanford, but the Cardinal were technically the ones that kickstarted this massive ongoing of occurrences when they throttled USC. Here is how Stanford kicked off the offseason early in the 2021 season:

A 42-28 USC loss to Stanford at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum -- the Trojans trailed 42-13 early in the fourth quarter -- provided the final evidence athletic director Mike Bohn needed to dump the embattled Clay Helton. USC got an early jump on a critical coaching search after several underwhelming (and unsuccessful) hires, and Bohn went big.

The firing of Helton of course led to the hiring of Lincoln Riley from Oklahoma, who many thought was connected to the LSU job and weren't even factoring in the USC vacancy. The Riley saga was also a major piece of the offseason, as coaches were taking jobs elsewhere and quarterbacks began to transfer. One of the coaches who took a new job was one of Stanford's biggest rivals in Notre Dame's Brian Kelly, who took the LSU job; making way for Marcus Freeman to take over at Notre Dame.

However Riley to USC was a huge source of movement when it came to the transfer portal, as Oklahoma quarterback Caleb Williams followed Riley to USC to help form what would eventually turn into a superclass of transfers. 

Now granted Helton was likely on the way out even before the Stanford loss, but the Cardinal beating USC in the manner they did fast-tracked the whole process.