THE HIRING OF LINCOLN RILEY HAS BECOME USC’S LATEST INTERNAL SCREWUP
A school of scandals turned to him as “one of the biggest moves in the history of the game,” but so far, he has lost four of his last 10 while Oklahoma is positioned for the College Football Playoff
The University of Smeared Curmudgeons? The University of Spoiled Children? Scandals are a catastrophic part of the USC curriculum, where you’ve had a dead gynecologist accused of sexually abusing patients for decades, a medical school dean who invited addicts and prostitutes to use drugs with him, and allowed lush parents such as Lori Laughlin to enroll kids via the “Varsity Blues” fix.
What’s next in a cauldron of extraordinarily bright minds that Steven Spielberg should disown at once? Oh, we have another football fiasco. Seems Lincoln Riley was hired before the 2022 season by athletic director Mike Bohn, who regaled his appointment as nothing short of history-making. “It was never our goal to change the landscape of college football with one of the biggest moves in the history of the game, but we did exactly that,” he said.
Not 18 months later, Bohn resigned — and hasn’t been heard from since — with the administration prepared to assail him for inappropriate remarks concerning female colleagues. Amid that, Riley’s consequential “moves” have resulted in three losses to Utah, a bowl-game collapse to Tulane and another season where USC is no better than it was under deposed Clay Helton, who is 5-2 at Georgia Southern. If Riley wanted a national championship for the first time since Pete Carroll, who left a violation-crackled building that included vacating a 2004 BCS championship, his response has insiders asking if he’s yet another mistake by a program that never, ever should lose. This is still the place, after all, with 72-and-sunny weather, song girls and the “Fight On!” rally tune. Has Carroll jinxed the joint forever with his own scandal?
First Lane Kiffin, who was fired in a terminal by an airport tarmac. Then Steve Sarkisian, whose alcohol issues led to his runoff. Then Helton, who wasn’t close to prepared for the assignment. Once Bohn was hired and raided Oklahoma for Riley, who produced Heisman Trophy winners and title contenders, the “landscape of college football” would rock like Bear Bryant meets Knute Rockne meets Nick Saban. That hasn’t happened. It might not ever happen. Seems the Top 20 doesn’t have USC this week, as a lack of direction, resilience and defensive know-how nearly led to losses against Colorado and Arizona, a wicked loss at Notre Dame and, now, another loss to the undermanned Utes.
A classic appearance of another Heisman winner, Caleb Williams, has been doomed by a defense with little chance. Riley should have fired coordinator Alex Grinch last winter but stuck with one of his original hires from Norman. Instead, the internal promises before the 2023 season were these words from the head coach: “We’re going to put a plan together for this team to go get what was out there, what we left hanging out there the year before.”
It’s still there hanging. Williams won’t win a second Heisman and now is being explored as the No. 1 overall pick in April’s NFL draft, as the Bears are hailing a new quarterbacking hero — Tyson Bagent, undrafted free agent, arm tattoos — and might not have either of the top two choices. I’d still take Williams, but in the Chicago swirl, Bagent for one week beats Caleb for 15 years. And Grinch’s defense? What happens when Washington’s Michael Penix Jr. and Oregon’s Bo Nix eye victims after Bryson Barnes, replacing Utah starter Cameron Rising all season, accounted for four touchdowns while throwing for 235 yards and ran for 57 more?
Suddenly, Riley might start asking how long he’ll remain at USC, which runs its program like an NFL operation and has the NIL and transfer portal well in play. It might have made sense last month for the Bears to consider chasing Riley and drafting Williams. Now? Who wants Lincoln? Not even those in the Land of Lincoln?
“We're not going anywhere,” Riley said Saturday night. “We signed up to do this thing for a long time.”
But when Bohn departed, he was replaced as AD by Jennifer Cohen, who made a marvelous splash at Washington by hiring Kalen DeBoer. He and the Huskies are ranked No. 5 this week, and once Ohio State loses at Michigan, it’s possible they’ll slide into the College Football Playoff. Of course, Riley signed a $110 million deal for 10 years. He’s only two seasons into the span. He’s not going anywhere at the moment — unless he wants to go. Bigger NFL jobs are funneled to others, and with Williams leaving, the Trojans might not be headed anywhere special as they head to the Big Ten next season — and must deal with the Wolverines, Buckeyes and Penn State while Washington, Oregon and UCLA come along.
Does he want to stay? Riley has been blaming local media troops — which hasn’t been a grand idea since arriving in a major market — and reassessing immediate plans. “We’re in the middle of the season. That’s a dream world,” he said. “You’re fighting your ass off every single week. We don’t come in every single week talking about winning a national championship, going to the playoffs. I don’t know where that narrative starts. If you let the outside set expectations, you're always being measured up against that. All the outside noise that comes with it, it can get to you. I think at times, it’s fair to say, it’s got to this team. I don’t think in a negative way, but we’ve had to really fight the urge — I think we’ve had to fight to keep things on our own terms.”
The narrative starts with him. He’s the one who has said it, repeatedly. Think national title! Not now? “Everybody expects you to be good. Everybody expects you can have a championship-caliber team,” he said. “And when you're constantly trying to live up to those expectations, you can kind of fall away from maybe what puts you in that position in the first place.”
How? By showing no discipline or class on defense? All of which has led to a substantial falloff with Williams, who was brilliant with 21 touchdown passes in the first five games but didn’t have a scoring toss against Utah. One talk-radio topic: He sits the rest of the season so he doesn’t risk serious injury. That’s some ending for Riley, who started with an 11-1 regular season and has gone 6-4 since.
“I think that’s part of our progression as a program. I think when you haven’t been in this position in a while, it takes time,” he said. “It’s going to take some scars, some tough lessons to learn. These are lessons we couldn’t learn last year. It wasn’t like this. It didn’t feel like this. And this is part of our progression. It sucks. It kills you, but this program will be better for it because for the first time in a while, there are going to be championship expectations here and those aren’t going anywhere. So I’m heartbroken for the team right now. In the big picture, this program will be more ready to be back on stage than it was for a long, long time.”
He didn’t allow his players to speak after the 34-32 loss. It’s another social flaw for a coach who grew up in Muleshoe, a small town of 5,000 in west Texas. He’s still big there, but in Norman — hmmm, guess where the Sooners are in the rankings now? They’re No. 6, positioned for a spot in the final four, and the biggest hero is coach Brent Venables. They certainly love him back in Clemson, where he worked 10 years as a defensive wizard. The once-beloved Dabo Swinney is in his own world of hurt, saying after a double-overtime loss to Miami that the Tigers indeed have a sports psychologist on staff.
“We’ve got one,” Swinney said. “He’s probably on suicide watch right now.”
That’s wickedly moronic, Dabo, but the Sooners’ faithful love Venables because he keeps making a national model of a program … the one Riley left. In September, he said he quickly sold his Norman home after multiple break-ins with his young daughters around. “I didn’t care about the house. I didn’t care about anything else, just their safety,” Riley said. “We wanted the girls to be able to finish out school, because the semester was almost over. And as that stuff transpired we said, ‘No, we gotta get them the hell out of here as fast as we can.’ ”
They did. The Rileys are in Palos Verdes now. The Oklahoma people don’t care.
They just want a national championship, while one website has USC playing Dec. 28 … in the Alamo Bowl.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.