A third Heisman QB? The secret to Lincoln Riley’s unprecedented success
Tyler Greenawalt (Yahoo Sports) — Don’t call Lincoln Riley a quarterback whisperer.
Yes, he’s coached four Heisman Trophy candidates since 2017. Yes, his quarterbacks finished top-10 in passing yards 18 times since he became an offensive coordinator in 2010. But the term “whisperer” doesn’t paint the full picture. Riley doesn’t just wave a magic wand or call a perfect game to create some of the best quarterbacks in college football. It takes an offense built around a quarterback’s strength as well as communication, confidence and, above all else, trust between player and coach.
“I don’t think it should be a term,” Riley told Yahoo Sports. “When you’re within the walls of these things, you realize all that’s gotta happen for a team and then — as a byproduct of a team — individuals to be successful.”
But Riley’s ability to mold quarterbacks into incredibly successful players cannot be discounted, either. And Caleb Williams is the most recent example of Riley’s tutelage. The USC quarterback is one of four Heisman Trophy candidates this year — and the fourth coached by Riley after Baker Mayfield, Kyler Murray and Jalen Hurts at Oklahoma.
If Williams takes the award, Riley would become just the second coach with a Heisman winner at multiple schools and the sixth to coach three Heisman winners (Mayfield won in 2017 and Murray won in 2018 when Riley coached at Oklahoma). However, Riley would be the first to have all three winners be quarterbacks. And that is the remarkable part of Riley’s accomplishment.
“I’ve been extremely fortunate to coach some great players and great, just great people, great competitors,” Riley said, “and been able to do it at two really, really good schools.”
(Stefan Milic/Yahoo Sports illustration)
Riley adapts to his quarterbacks
Arguably the most striking element of Riley’s success with quarterbacks is how different they all are — physically, stylistically and personality-wise.
Mayfield was brash and boisterous; Murray was reserved yet confident; Hurts, who only played under Riley for one season after he transferred from Alabama, was, in Riley’s own words “pretty serious, at times stoic.” All three commanded the offense with different strengths and weaknesses.
Williams looks like a mixture of his three predecessors. Between his arm strength, rushing ability and eclecticism, the sophomore signal-caller flourished in Riley’s Air Raid offense after originally playing under him at Oklahoma in 2021 before following Riley to USC earlier this year. Williams finished fourth in passing yards and tied for first in passing touchdowns with a 66.1 completion percentage.
So how did Riley mold four very different people into Heisman contenders? He leaned on their character traits as competitors and blended them with variations of the offense he learned under Mike Leach at Texas Tech and augmented during his years rising through the coaching ranks.
“All those guys are different. They’re different physically for sure,” Riley told Yahoo Sports. “But I think more than anything as we’ve evaluated — trying to evaluate the intangibles: How smart these guys are, their competitiveness, their desire to improve, their belief in themselves? I think that those are things that we’ve put a lot of stock in. Those are like all shared characteristics that they all have, even though they’re all a lot different.”
The three OU quarterbacks — Mayfield, Murray and Hurts — noticed Riley’s innate skill, too.
Mayfield told Bleacher Report in 2017 that how Riley “adapt[s] to our personality and get[s] the best out of our players has been huge.” That year, Mayfield won the Heisman after he took the college football world by storm with the second-most passing touchdowns, passing yards and a ridiculous nation-leading 70.5 completion percentage during the Sooners’ run to College Football Playoff.
Murray said in a 2022 ESPN article that “the relationship [Riley] has with the quarterbacks — he’s great at it.” Murray finished third in passing yards and passing touchdowns when he won the Heisman in 2018.
Hurts added that Riley “had a very unique ability to put players in positions to make plays” because of his flexibility on offense. Hurts finished second in the Heisman voting behind Joe Burrow after a 3,851-yard season that included 32 passing touchdowns and 20 rushing touchdowns.
Lincoln Riley has coached two Heisman-winning QB, including Kyler Murray. If Caleb Williams wins this year, Riley will be the first to coach three Heisman-winning quarterbacks. (AP/Craig Ruttle)
Confidence is key
Riley coaches by the mantra “if your system is not a quarterback-friendly system, you need to find a new system.” And that idea feeds directly into how he builds an offense around his quarterbacks.
The basics remain the same with the Riley Air Raid offense: High-tempo possessions, lots of plays and big shots downfield. But Riley doesn’t just want quarterbacks who can execute the offense, he wants quarterbacks who walk out as “the most confident guy on the field every single time.”
Part of that comes naturally — especially with the aforementioned quartet. But it’s also nurtured by Riley’s coaching style.
He asks for input from his quarterbacks on plays and strategy and tries to build comfort into his curated system. Sometimes that even includes ditching concepts he’d rather keep in the books.
“At the end of the day, I’m not the one doing it,” Riley said. “They’re the ones that have gotta go execute it. We’ve had plenty of times through the years where I’ve had maybe an idea or thought that we feel confident with work and makes a lot of sense schematically. But if the guys aren’t feeling it, if it’s something that doesn’t just quite click for them, we toss it out.
“That probably is a source of confidence for some of our guys because they know we’re not gonna walk into a gameplan with something that they don’t wholeheartedly believe in, even if we wholeheartedly believe in it. I think that, in a sense, kind of empowers them and they walk in with a plan that they have full confidence in.”
Former Oklahoma quarterbacks Austin Kendall and Reece Clark, who both backed up Mayfield and Murray, saw that unfold firsthand. If Mayfield or Murray changed a play at the line of scrimmage without consulting Riley, it didn’t result in anger or restatement. Riley would validate their ideas when reviewing the film but also explain why something didn’t work.
“Coach Riley’s never like, ‘Hey man, what were you thinking? You went against me,’ ” Clark said. “He would just kind of sit there and go through it and say ‘Hey, what were you seeing here that made you do that?’ He doesn’t break those guys down.”
“Lincoln kind of tailors towards that and lets the quarterback be his own person,” Kendall added. “He kind of forms around them and knows what they’re good at and what they’re weak at and then helps to build off that.”
This isn’t a new phenomenon in Riley’s tool belt. He’s been doing it since he coached at East Carolina more than a decade ago. Riley started with Dominique Davis — an experienced dual-threat quarterback who played at Boston College and Fort Scott Community College before he transferred to ECU in 2010. Davis finished fourth in the nation in passing yards and third in passing touchdowns during Riley’s first year as offensive coordinator. Three years later, Shane Carden went on to finish top-10 in passing yards and passing touchdowns in consecutive seasons.
Davis and Carden were “vastly different people,” Carden told Yahoo Sports, but Riley found a way to make both feel comfortable in the offense he brought with him from Texas Tech. That included constant communication about the game plan as well as continued confidence in the execution.
“He really asks your true opinion,” Carden said. “At the end of the day, if the quarterback doesn’t feel good about a play, why is it in the offense? He truly believes that.”
Carden recalled a moment during his sophomore year in 2012 when ECU failed to score a touchdown in a 27-6 loss to North Carolina. It was Carden’s third game as the starter. In the week following that loss, Riley told Carden, “You’re our guy, don’t worry about it,” before ECU won six of its next eight games.
“There are good strategists, good play callers in college football,” Carden said. “But what he does too is he has a good feel and understanding of a player.”
That, almost more than Riley’s ingenuity as a play-caller, is what makes him an effective coach who’s produced top quarterback talent, according to Ruffin McNeil, who’s coached with Riley at Texas Texas, ECU and Oklahoma. He, like Riley, doesn’t like the term “quarterback whisperer” because it also undermines and simplifies what Riley’s done at a basic human-to-human level.
“Lincoln’s ability to adapt to each kid — everybody can’t and everyone doesn’t do that,” McNeil told Yahoo Sports. “It’s bigger than that.”
For Riley, that meant building trust between himself and each of his quarterbacks individually. Mayfield, Murray, Hurts and Williams are all very talented football players in their own right. They all could have reached their respective college football heights on their own. But Riley built a foundation of trust and confidence that helped the four flourish.
“It’s about spending time with each other and investing in one another,” Riley said. “Investing in that person’s game, investing in them as a person.”
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