Lincoln Riley to Southern California becomes the sexiest coaching hire in college football since who cares when, a hire so sexy it might justify the ludicrous custom of rating the sexiness of coaching hires.
Who knew old Southern California still had it in it? Its coaching hunt had felt sort of doomed since its dismissal of Clay Helton on Sept. 13, two games into his seventh season. Who could infuse some outsize promise into the offseason following this season sitting on 4-7? Who could do better than the fleeting success of the 12 seasons since Pete Carroll fled for the NFL and took the memories of royalty?
Well, now, look at this thing. Southern California has a new coach who trades in quarterbacks in an era when quarterback relevance somehow towers more than ever, a coach who has tutored three of the 32 starting quarterbacks in the NFL, a coach whose insight helped fuel the churning statistics that fueled back-to-back Heisman Trophy winners in Baker Mayfield and Kyler Murray, a coach who remains somehow 38.
He’s one of those play-calling geeks, yes, his brain addled by the zigzags of receiver routes and whatnot, but the evidence suggests he also can construct or sustain a culture. His five Oklahoma teams spent regular seasons with one loss, one loss, one loss, two losses and two losses, the kind of airtightness that’s hard to attain but coveted with huffiness at places such as USC.
It’s some ascent for a guy who just reached the 20-year reunion age from the time he played defensive end and then quarterback at Muleshoe High in Muleshoe, Tex., near the New Mexico border. He went from there to Texas Tech as a walk-on, then to Mike Leach’s staff there, then to East Carolina, then to Oklahoma, then to succession of forever coach Bob Stoops. He didn’t make people forget Stoops, because that’s impossible, but he did make one of those rare transitions in which the new guy doesn’t run around getting lamented.
Now Stoops will coach Oklahoma in its bowl game just after Riley seemed established enough that he didn’t turn up much in the grand national mutterings about coaching searches — other than saying after Saturday’s loss to forever rival Oklahoma State that “I’m not going to be the next head coach at LSU.”
While he coached Oklahoma to one of those seasons an Oklahoma can have, in which the wins come but not by enough points and with insufficient beauty or annihilation, there went USC. It already seemed slight on buzz in Los Angeles last summer, even as the season approached. Its recruiting seemed to verge on energy and improvement — whereas now it will seem to verge on explosion.
Once September came and USC couldn’t stomach a pasting by Stanford, the bygone powerhouse hatched its coaching search and stammered through the forest full of big numbers and big commas. LSU and Florida would develop openings (with the Gators also filling theirs Sunday, landing Louisiana Lafayette’s Billy Napier). USC seemed destined for one of those coach-intro news conferences in which an athletic director tries to manufacture excitement in a world in which athletic directors weren’t born to manufacture excitement.
Cincinnati Coach Luke Fickell, whom USC Athletic Director Mike Bohn once hired to lead Bearcat-ness, seemed entrenched and, to boot, maybe even playoff-bound. Baylor Coach Dave Aranda, a native Californian who seems more outstanding by the day even while he’s never going to shout that — or shout at all — seemed maybe too quiet, even though that’s further proof that life is absurd. Iowa State Coach Matt Campbell, with his fantastic people skills, seems more interested in coach-player relationships than in basking in an upgraded heap of attention. The nerve of him.
Riley also doesn’t seek heightened attention; he already had that, and he already mastered handling that. He does seek possibility at a place that just sits around with bales of it, including a Pac-12 more navigable than the SEC that Oklahoma will join in a questionable fit of hubris. USC has been good and very good but not good enough for a while — Lane Kiffin got fired on a tarmac, Steve Sarkisian got fired for personal reasons, Ed Orgeron didn’t get hired, Helton didn’t get things back after 10-3 and 11-3 finishes in 2016 and 2017 — but it’s about to get energized again, foremost in recruiting.
Bohn pronounced himself “ecstatic” about the hire, and it didn’t even seem overwrought.
Now the West Coast has Riley in Los Angeles to go with Mario Cristobal’s revived recruiting lure up in Oregon. The Pac-12 has fresh light in a country that needs it. It’s going to be one hell of an offseason, and there’s nothing like hells of offseasons.
