{"id":140448,"date":"2026-01-19T20:01:10","date_gmt":"2026-01-19T20:01:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/140448\/"},"modified":"2026-01-19T20:01:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-19T20:01:10","slug":"usc-freshman-alijah-arenas-likely-to-debut-wednesday-vs-northweatern","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/140448\/","title":{"rendered":"USC freshman Alijah Arenas likely to debut Wednesday vs. Northweatern"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Five-star USC<\/a> freshman Alijah Arenas<\/a> is likely to make his long-awaited debut for the Trojans this week against Northwestern.<\/p>\n

Arenas is considered \u201cprobable\u201d for Wednesday\u2019s game, a person familiar with his status but not authorized to speak publicly told The Times.<\/p>\n

The addition of the five-star freshman, who has yet to play at USC since injuring his knee in the summer, comes at a critical time for the Trojans. USC has lost three of its last five since the start of its Big Ten slate.<\/p>\n

Arenas is the highest-rated recruit to join USC in Eric Musselman\u2019s two-year tenure with the Trojans. Before he injured his knee during practice, he was involved in a fiery single-car accident in his Tesla Cybertruck in the spring. He was hospitalized and put into an induced coma because of smoke inhalation.<\/p>\n

Arenas returned to practice last month and was initially expected to debut last week. Now he joins the Trojans with 13 games left in the regular season and a critical stretch ahead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Five-star USC freshman Alijah Arenas is likely to make his long-awaited debut for the Trojans this week against…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":140449,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[34731,70947,70945,423,70948,11489,48,52,51,47,50,49,70944,29149,70949,23138,70946,3533,70943,316,430],"class_list":["post-140448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-arena","tag-big-ten-slate","tag-eric-musselman","tag-game","tag-highest-rated-recruit","tag-knee","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-northweatern","tag-northwestern","tag-tesla-cybertruck","tag-trojans","tag-two-year-tenure","tag-usc","tag-usc-freshman-alijah-arenas","tag-wednesday","tag-week"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=140448"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140448\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/140449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=140448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=140448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}