LOS ANGELES — With 81 minutes to go, as Kendrick Lamar’s “Humble” blared over the stadium speakers and USC’s other offensive linemen leapt from the tunnel in boundless adrenaline, Emmanuel Pregnon hobbled.

He ran behind the group, his massive right knee wrapped in a massive bundle of gauze. He ran, placing noticeably less of his 320-pound frame on his right side. He ran at full speed Giancarlo Stanton rounds out the third Monday night.

Half an hour later he jogged to his feet, a Trojan warrior who had woken up that morning and decided he was ready to kill despite the groaning pain in his right leg.

“No matter how badly you hurt yourself,” Pregnon said Tuesday, “you have to push yourself to keep living.”

“I feel like … football is a game of life and it’s just a testament to how you should attack life.”

Left guard Pregnon, by all accounts, probably shouldn’t have played in a football game last Friday. Lincoln Riley and the USC staff actually didn’t think he would play against Rutgers. After sitting out briefly in the previous week’s win over Maryland, he was “pretty questionable” earlier in the week, as Riley described it, and was listed as questionable against the Scarlet Knights on USC’s Big Ten injury report .

Until the Colosseum cleared a 42-20 win — a win that, in large part, was USC’s best offensive performance of the season — Pregnon slowly climbed the postgame ladder for the honor of leading the Spirit of Troy. Slow. It still hurts. Hand over hand and step over step until he could survey the field for which he had just put his body on the line.

“I thought I was going to fall through this thing,” Pregnon smiled Tuesday.

He was standing tall on a bad leg after a game against the Scarlet Knights that allowed no pressure. It was the culmination of Pregnon’s two-year rise to USC since the Wyoming transfer in 2023, continuing the season as the steadiest member of a once shaky line that has quietly rounded into an effective unit in recent weeks.

He entered the offseason, as quarterback Miller Moss said Tuesday, having started to “take his body seriously.” After a freshman year on an unrelated USC line where he didn’t leave a resounding impact — positive or negative — Pregnon’s attitude toward the weight room has changed. So did his effort. So did his leadership.

“I’m commemorating and honoring those guys,” Pregnon said in early October of the departed offensive line veterans, “by taking that position and taking on that role.”

On a line that gave starting moments to steadily developing youngsters Alani Noa and Elijah Paige, that stability was much needed next to center Jonah Monheim. Pregnon hadn’t allowed a sack in seven games as a starter entering Friday; his absence would have hurt. Riley even made the comment, the head coach said Tuesday, that he didn’t know if Pregnon would be “mentally tough not just to play, but to play well.”

Shootit would hurt, Pregnon said on Monday. But he played. And he played well.

“The more people that can be in line with people like that and attitudes like that,” Moss said, “the better off we’re going to be as a team.”

Injury updates

After four huge starters in USC’s secondary were scratched against Rutgers — safety Kamari Ramsey and cornerbacks Jaylin Smith, Greedy Vance Jr. and Jacobe Covington — it’s still unclear whether any will retire a Pregnon next Saturday against Washington.