USC makes bombshell football hire, agreeing to terms with Lincoln Riley
J. Brady McCollough, Ryan Kartje (LA Times) — One of the top coaches in college football is on his way to L.A.
USC is closing its three-month search for a new head football coach with a bombshell hire, landing Oklahoma coach Lincoln Riley to turn around the Trojans program.
USC fans have been waiting for years for the school to bring in a coach that can restore its treasured football program to glory. In Riley, it now has a coveted coach considered among the most innovative minds in football, one who has already proven capable of leading a prestigious program to the College Football Playoff semifinals.
Riley has agreed to terms and will be the 30th head coach of the Trojans, ending a search characterized by its quiet with a boom that will be felt across college football, a source with knowledge of the search not authorized to speak publicly about it told The Los Angeles Times.
USC officially announced the hire at about 5 p.m. Sunday.
The question lingered for three months: Would USC athletic director Mike Bohn take advantage of the long runway he gained by firing Clay Helton Sept. 13 and land a coach that could quickly rally the Trojan legions?
Even as other major jobs came open at Louisiana State and Florida and schools scrambled to hand out big-money extensions to keep coaches in place, Bohn has provided a resounding answer by luring Riley to Los Angeles.
“We are ecstatic to announce Lincoln Riley as our new head coach and welcome his wife, Caitlin, and their daughters, Sloan and Stella, to the Trojan Family,” Bohn said in a news release. “Lincoln is the rarest combination of an extraordinary person and elite football coach. His successes and offensive accolades as a head coach the past five years are astonishing. Lincoln will recruit relentlessly, develop his players on and off the field, and implement a strong culture in which the program will operate with the highest level of integrity and professionalism.”
Riley will immediately take over running the USC football program, with Bob Stoops to coach the Sooners in their bowl game. Donte Williams will remain the Trojans’ interim head coach for Saturday’s game at California.
“He is known for caring about the development and character of his players and winning at the highest level,” USC President Carol Folt said in a news release. “Mike Bohn and I share a vision for the future of USC athletics and hiring Coach Riley is a huge statement about where we are going as a program.”
Riley highlighted the opportunities that lie ahead for him leading the USC program.
“USC has an unparalleled football tradition with tremendous resources and facilities, and the administration has made a deep commitment to winning. I look forward to honoring that successful tradition and building on it,” Riley said in a news release. “The pieces are in place for us to build the program back to where it should be and the fans expect it to be. We will work hard to develop a physical football team that is dominant on both lines of scrimmage, and has a dynamic balanced offense and a stout aggressive defense.
“I want to thank the administration, coaches and players at Oklahoma for five incredible years as their head coach. We accomplished some great things there and I will always cherish my time as a Sooner.”
Of the other coaches linked to USC’s search, from Cincinnati’s Luke Fickell to Baylor’s Dave Aranda to Iowa State’s Matt Campbell, none boasts a resume quite like Riley, who led Oklahoma to the College Football Playoff in each of his first three seasons as coach. He hasn’t looked back since, winning 55 games and four consecutive Big 12 championships as the Sooners coach, while finishing no lower than seventh in the polls in any of his five seasons.
In that short time, Riley has proven himself as college football’s preeminent quarterback guru. His first two quarterbacks at Oklahoma, Baker Mayfield and Kyler Murray, both won the Heisman Trophy before being selected No. 1 overall. The Sooners next quarterback, Jalen Hurts, was a Heisman finalist. All three are now starting NFL quarterbacks.
That reputation should serve him well in Southern California, where the landscape is replete with top quarterback recruits, several of whom Riley previously plucked out from under USC.
His instant success, virtually unmatched in college football, made Riley one of the most coveted coaches not just in the college ranks, but the NFL as well. Though, while his name was floated for years at the top of hot boards and coaching candidate lists, Riley stood pat with the Sooners.
It seemed that would be the case again this season after Riley denied Saturday night in the wake of Oklahoma’s season-ending defeat that he would leave Oklahoma for LSU.
But just as Oklahoma prepares to leave for the Southeastern Conference, where the competition for playoff bids was bound to get more fierce, USC swooped in less than one day later, pulling a deal together in a matter of hours that could define the direction of its football program for the next decade.
The Trojans have not appeared in a College Football Playoff in its eight years of existence and have won just one Pac-12 title since 2008 when the Pete Carroll era was still going strong.
It used to be a guarantee that USC, with its abundant riches to pick from across the Southland, would compile a top-five recruiting class. But it has not done so since 2018, the most glaring sign that the program had lost prestige under Helton.
Riley is the first hire that USC has made since Carroll who is nationally relevant on his own merit. Lane Kiffin and Steve Sarkisian were Carroll proteges who were brought back to keep the good times rolling after the NCAA handed the program massive sanctions in 2010 because of the Reggie Bush scandal. Helton, hired as an assistant by Kiffin, had never been a head coach when he was promoted to the permanent role by then-athletic director Pat Haden in 2015.
Bohn, after deciding to keep Helton in place after the 2019 and 2020 seasons, fired Helton after USC was beaten soundly by Stanford 42-28 at the Coliseum in the second game of the year. His final record with the Trojans was 46-24.
Helton has since been hired to lead Georgia Southern, while USC leaders patiently waited for their chance to land Riley.
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