Things are rarely quiet in Los Angeles.
But that’s been the reality for this USC team, which will charge into Ann Arbor this weekend looking for a 4-0 start and a second Top-25 win in September.
Ranked just 23rd in the preseason AP Poll, there was barely any preseason hype. The Trojans were a distant 5th in Big Ten title odds. They have a relative unknown at quarterback — Miller Moss is the least-famous signal caller who has played for Lincoln Riley since he was East Carolina’s offensive coordinator in 2014.
Riley earned his quiet year through some unfortunate decision-making during his first 2 seasons at USC. He held onto the Alex Grinch experiment for too long, a mistake he previously made at Oklahoma with then-DC Mike Stoops. That led to an 8-5 season in 2023. Losing former Heisman winner Caleb Williams only added to a sense of apathy around the program heading into this season.
The good news is that Riley seems to have nailed his defensive coordinator hire. He poached D’Anton Lynn from UCLA last offseason, and the early returns are excellent. Through 3 games, USC is 55th nationally in adjusted EPA per play. That might not seem like something to write home about, but Riley’s first 2 USC teams ranked 111th and 124th in that category.
A jump into the top 60 has a chance to be monumental for the Trojans. Any Riley team is going to have an elite offense, regardless of whether the quarterback has Heisman Trophy buzz. A top-75 defense and a top-5 offense (well, a No. 1 offense) is exactly the recipe for how Riley typically made the College Football Playoff at Oklahoma.
In sports, the way we talk about teams implies a wide variety of possible outcomes. This team has a huge ceiling. Or … If they’re not careful, the bottom could fall out.
For Riley, his offenses have always established an extremely high ceiling. But his defenses have represented a foreboding floor on what his teams can achieve. The equilibrium between those forces has resulted in a coaching career that — to this point — can only be described as unsatisfying despite producing 3 Heisman Trophy winners, a runner-up and 4 10-win seasons in 7 full years as a head coach.
As volatile as college football can be, Riley’s results have been fairly stable. In his 7 seasons at Oklahoma (including 2 as offensive coordinator), Oklahoma lost exactly 2 games every single year. Exactly 2. Sometimes the second loss came in the College Football Playoff. Sometimes it came early in the year. But it was always 2 losses per year.
In Year 1 at USC, Riley led the Trojans to an 11-1 regular season before picking up defeats in the Pac-12 title game and the Cotton Bowl to close out the year. His first season established what many thought would be Riley’s floor at USC.
And then last season, the bottom fell out and revealed what the floor for a Riley-led program really is.
USC’s 8-5 season in 2023 resulted in critiques from everyone — from Los Angeles columnist Bill Plaschke to SEC mouthpiece Paul Finebaum. A lot of people in Norman, Oklahoma, were saying I told you so.
And those critics were (mostly) correct. Riley failed spectacularly in 2023 and he failed a lot in Norman, even if his record didn’t always show it.
And while he had success in Norman too — even if some Oklahoma fans don’t want to admit it in hindsight — he never won the big one. He only came particularly close once, losing the 2018 Rose Bowl to Georgia in a Playoff semifinal — a game that’s on the shortlist for Game of the Century in college football.
Coming off last year’s stench, Riley seemingly sensed the need for USC to create some momentum in 2024. According to a report from SDS’ Matt Hayes earlier this offseason, he wanted out of the LSU game.
Thank goodness, for USC’s sake, that Riley’s efforts didn’t lead to the cancellation of that matchup. USC’s win over LSU means this program now suddenly has some belief heading into this weekend’s Top-25 matchup with the defending national champs.
Oh, how quickly things can change in college football. A month ago, it looked like the Riley experiment was failing. Now, USC could be days away from picking up its second Top-25 win away from home this month.
What an incredible opportunity this is for Riley. In some ways, this season is a reset for his career. This weekend’s Michigan game reminds me of Oklahoma’s trip to Tennessee in 2015. It was Riley’s second game as OU’s offensive coordinator. Baker Mayfield was months from becoming a household name. OU was coming off of an 8-5 season the year before.
After a slow start that night in Knoxville, the offense finally clicked. Riley’s offense scored 14 points in the 4th quarter to force overtime and the Sooners eventually won. They ended up going to the College Football Playoff that year for the first time.
As a program, Oklahoma rode the momentum of that Tennessee win for a long time. It didn’t matter that the Vols only went 5-3 in the SEC that season. It was a signature win for a program that badly needed one coming off of a terrible season that saw the firing of a coordinator.
It’s not a perfect allegory for several reasons, but Riley has a chance to pull off a similar feat this weekend in Ann Arbor. Only now, he’s not a national unknown. He’s a proven commodity on (nearly) the biggest stages of this sport. A win at the Big House would supercharge the expectations for a year that started out quiet and unassuming.
So far, we’ve yet to see what the ceiling of a Riley program can be. One with the offense firing at an elite level along with a disciplined, aggressive, unforgiving defense. Perhaps it’s a year away. It’s possible we’ll never see it.
Or maybe it’s happening right now. If it is, Riley and the Trojans can prove it with a loud statement victory over Michigan on Saturday.
