He can’t vote, sign a legally binding contract or serve on a jury. 

One thing the youngest player in recent USC football history can do: help the Trojans reach the College Football Playoff.

That’s the enviable situation Ethan “Boobie” Feaster finds himself in at a time when most people his age are prepping for their final year of high school.

Feaster gave that up, reclassifying to join the Trojans a year early. He just turned 17 in late May but immediately blossomed after joining the team this summer.

“He’s game-ready as soon as he came in,” veteran wide receiver Terrell Anderson said.

Coach Lincoln Riley praised Feaster for his maturity and ability to push through a soft-tissue injury early in training camp.

“He’s shown the ability to make some explosive plays and like a lot of young guys, it will be a battle of consistency for him,” Riley said of the wispy 6-foot-1, 190-pound receiver. “You know, the explosiveness and the wow plays are there, but sometimes it’s the ones that the world doesn’t see or aren’t going to end up on the highlights that are going to matter to winning too, but really bright future, humble, hard-working kid.”

Having already proven himself to coaches and teammates, now all Feaster needs is a nickname – The Trojan Tot? Boobie The Kid? (We’ll have to wait for a preference since USC doesn’t make freshmen available for interviews until they appear in the game.)

He goes by Boobie in a nod to Boobie Miles, the running back protagonist from “Friday Night Lights.” Like the other Boobie, Feaster knows plenty about playing high school football in Texas, having starred at DeSoto High.

He was the youngest prospect to be selected as a Dave Campbell’s Texas Football five-star. ESPN ranked him as the 28th-best high school player in the nation after he made 69 catches for 1,264 yards and 15 touchdowns as a junior.

Feaster is part of a youth movement that could be particularly sweeping at wide receiver, where freshmen Trent Mosely and Kayden Dixon-Wyatt are expected to immediately become part of the rotation, if not start. The same goes for freshman tight end Mark Bowman.

“There will be some guys that start, there will be some guys that play a lot, there will be some guys that are going to be solid twos that rotate a lot,” Riley said. “There’s going to be a lot of presence from our freshman class on the field.”

Feaster is playing catch-up in addition to catch because his reclassification prevented him from joining the team this spring like a lot of his fellow freshmen. Then again, maybe that doesn’t matter given how far he’s come in such a short span.

“He’s a mature kid,” Riley said. “I think the other guys in the receiving room and on the team have done a good job of kind of recognizing like, hey, here’s a new, very young guy coming in, we’ve got to put our arms around this guy and really do a good job kind of welcoming him to the group and acclimating him to the group, so I think the team has taken him in and Boobie’s kind of low-key, he works very hard, he’s kind of quiet. He’s learning fast.”

He’s also remained the same, in some reassuring ways. That’s what wide receivers coach Dennis Simmons said he’s learned about Feaster since meeting him when he was an even younger teen in the ninth grade.

“He’s kind of reaffirmed all of those things you thought about him, like, OK, is his character true to what you believe it is because a lot of times in the recruiting process you get a handful of days, a handful of weeks [to get to know someone],” Simmons said. “With him, you truly got time to kind of validate what your thoughts were.”

Anderson isn’t shy with his thoughts on Feaster, predicting he’ll become a freshman All-American. But maybe it’s unfair to heap so many expectations on someone this young – no matter how talented – just starting his college journey.

“At the end of the day,” Simmons said, “he’s a 17-year-old kid.”