USC Football Preview 2025: Lincoln Riley On the Hot Seat? Be Careful What You Wish For

Miami Herald

5 hours ago

Make sure you take a giant deep breath on this one, everyone, as you're busy fanning the flames under the hot seat.He's Lincoln Riley. He'll only be 42 when the season starts, and there are decades of football coaching ahead for him.He's the guy who took Oklahoma to four straight conference championships with four straight College Football Playoff appearances, and he went 10-2 in his final season before leaving for USC.(By the way, Oklahoma is 22-17 with two losing seasons in the last three since Riley left.)
X CFN, Fiu | CFN Facebook | Bluesky Fiu, CFN USC Offense BreakdownUSC Defense BreakdownSeason Prediction, Win Total, Keys to SeasonCompletely lost in the fog of hysteria by those who expected a national title run in Year Two at USC, and absolutely in Year Three, was that Riley went 11-3 in his first season after taking over a floundering 4-8 program.Everyone blew off the offensive pop and ripped on the defense. And then, last year, his Trojan D allowed 134 fewer points than the 2023 version. That didn't seem to matter because the team kept losing in brutally painful fashion.
No, it wasn't okay to go 6-6 in USC's first year in the Big Ten - seriously, I have no skin in this game as the apparent leader of the Lincoln Riley PR Club - but it opened with a win over LSU, closed with a Las Vegas Bowl win over Texas A&M, and five of the six losses were by one score. In the other defeat, USC was about to go in and tie Notre Dame late, and then came the two monster pick-sixes by the Irish to screw that up.USC lost to Michigan with 37 seconds to play. It gave up the game-winning score to Minnesota with 57 seconds left, and to Maryland with 53 seconds to go. It lost to Penn State in a wild overtime firefight, and came up just short at Washington.
As it turned out, Notre Dame and Penn State were pretty good - they played each other in the College Football Playoff semifinals - and those other four losses were the four games played outside of Los Angeles and Las Vegas.Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it's USC. Most of those losses shouldn't have been that close to begin with. And yes, it's Lincoln Riley. His first year was fantastic, but going 15-11 over the last two years wasn't okay.
And this is where cooler, critical minds have to try to calm everyone down going into this supposedly do-or-die season for the Riley era.USC has a funky way of hiring great coaches who leave, and then do big things somewhere else.Lane Kiffin might be the best football coach going - seriously, what he did at Florida Atlantic, and what he's doing at Ole Miss, is next to impossible.He was handed USC when it was deep in a coma after the ridiculous punishment for Reggie Bush doing NIL before it was cool. The expectations were high with a huge 10-2 season, the program had to rebuild, and he got sacked.Kiffin is now 44-18 at Ole Miss, after winning two conference titles with two 11-win seasons in three years at FAU.
Ed Orgeron went 6-2 with USC in 2013 when Kiffin was launched. Okay, so his time in Baton Rouge imploded in the end, but his 2019 LSU team had, arguably, the greatest season in college football history.Steve Sarkisian's situation was far different, and there were far more important personal issues when he departed USC, but ultimately, he became the one who made Texas a national championship power again. He won 25 games in his first three years in Austin - one fewer than Riley has won so far at USC.
Pete Carroll didn't win a national title until his fourth season, John McKay started 8-11-1, and …USC has the talent and the schedule - even with road games at Notre Dame, Oregon, Illinois, and Nebraska - to have a breakthrough season as a Big Ten program. So yes, USC needs to win more now for Lincoln Riley to stick around. At the very least, it has to look like he's close to making USC into USC again, and it starts with getting more out of the … USC Offense BreakdownUSC Defense BreakdownSeason Prediction, Win Total, Keys to Season
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