USC hires Lincoln Riley from Oklahoma, making major splash in college football coaching carousel
Acquiring Riley is a coup for a Trojans team that has been floundering in recent years
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USC with a big time hire
- Thread starter kougkurt
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I guess the SEC did not appeal to him. Smart move. He'd get fired in three years for 8 win seasons.
This is how you do it if you are a USC (or Texas, LSU, etc.). No reason to screw around with G of 5 grads, failed retreads, or unproven coordinators (Herman, Sark, and so forth). Pay up and get the legitimate top coach if you're the kind of place that can pull it off. Not great news for us playing them but great for the Pac-12, which will have some benefits for us. Just hope this doesn't mean UW is able to get someone it otherwise would have lost out on.
USC hires Lincoln Riley from Oklahoma, making major splash in college football coaching carousel
Acquiring Riley is a coup for a Trojans team that has been floundering in recent years
Huge for the conference. Good for USC to go hire a great coach, and a Leach disciple too.
UW getting Campbell I think. I don’t like it as a competitor but love it for the conference. Unless OU now panics and offers Campbell, of course.
Reports say they wiffed, DeBoer the likely guy.
Kinda surprised Riley left UO. SC has tradition and of course $$ but the program is a dumpster fire, the stadium is terrible,they don't draw squat for attendance and they haven't been elite since the Pete Carroll dirty program days.
Guess he wants to be the big fish in the little pond.
Guess he wants to be the big fish in the little pond.
USC is still USC. Alabama was a dumpster fire before Saban. Plus, the Carroll dirty program is so exaggerated. Riley should be able to go into Los Angeles and clean up. Plus, with Harrell and McGuire coaching the USC offense this past season, it will be an easy transition to what Riley wants to do.
I believe Riley's time at TT overlap a bit when Harrell was really young at TT. He might keep Harrell on as OC.
That's right. He was a quality control coach at WSU. I didn't even think of him, as he was not one of the main staff coaches.
I was thinking the same thing. They certainly know each other from Texas Tech.
Leach has always said there was one job out there that he really wanted, would leave for, or something like that. Some have speculated that it might be BYU or somewhere in Florida (maybe Miami) for obvious reasons, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was Oklahoma. That's not to say Oklahoma would hire Leach, of course.
He also had like 4 4-5 star kids out of SoCal. that were committing to OU. My guess they flip between 2-4 of those.
He is smart enough to realize that USC is the kind of place, in the kind of conference, that both allows an unremarkable steward like Clay Helton to win 10 or 11 games, and also allows him to stay there 6+ seasons after clearly not being the guy, yet has the resources and pull to win a natty. He can pull in top 5 classes year after year and his record will be good enough, even if he never gets over the top, to go to the NFL if he wants. Look at who his greatest competition is in the Pac-12 South ... some soft, weak programs he can beat like a drum (UCLA and ASU), with the former not taking football that seriously and the latter a perpetual underachiever in a decent but not amazing situation, and, as the toughest competitor (Utah), a program that in Big 12 terms is something like Baylor. In the north, Oregon will keep being pretty solid from a talent perspective as long as Chrissie Poo is there, but it isn't truly elite and can be beaten. Basically, he can keep doing what he was doing at Oklahoma. To me, other than the tax hit, this is a smart move. I'm not into going on about how great the SEC is, but you can't deny that it is pretty loaded from the middle to the top. If Florida improves, Georgia stays where it's at, and the SEC West stays as loaded as it is right now -- when the worst teams are as good as Arkansas and Mississippi State, Ole Miss is a borderline top 15 team, and Bama, A&M, and Auburn are committed to winning and capable of making the playoff -- the same coaching and recruiting efforts that might get him 8-4 or 9-3 in the SEC with Oklahoma could get him to 11-1 or 12-0 at USC, and keep his overall record and reputation pristine and allowing him to stay in the playoff conversation just about every year.
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Rams were in St Louis and the Chargers in San Diego during Pete’s run. Way more competition now.
Grinch to the FCS, at best. Dude is the most overrated coordinator in college football.
He will be at a P5 for sure. Someone will hire him. For starters Herbstreit says “Alex Grinch’s defense” only second to “Brent Venables defense”. Some AD will have heard his name on TV enough to offer him a job.
which is weird because we’re pretty much statistically better in every defensive category than Oklahoma. I don’t see him at a P5. He’s gonna have to cut his teeth at Akron or somewhere like that. That is what Matt Campbell did. He needs to take any head coaching job he can get. Or just be a coordinator his entire life. Nothing wrong with that. You’d make more as a DC at a P5 than a head coach in the MAC.
I’m not disagreeing with you that he shouldn’t be hired to a P5, I’m just saying all it takes is one and he gets a lot of air time. Someone’s gonna hire him, he won’t have to coach at an Akron first.
Great hire but it kind of reminds me when they lured Lane Kiffin out of Tennessee and that didn't workout very well! So far, since Pete Carroll got hired all of USC's coaching hires have offensive coaches like Helton, Sarkisian, and Kiffin. Hopefully, Lincoln Riley pans out!
Interesting to see Akron mentioned in this thread. It appears UO's offensive coordinator, Joe Morehead, is the leading candidate for the Zips job.
Glad Cougar
I think OU would have gone in that direction 3-4 years ago. At 60, Leach is starting to get long in the tooth. I think OU would want a bigger name, like Bob Stoops, if the coach is only going to be around for 5 or so years.
Riley is tough to judge because he was handed a well oiled machine that he had already been involved with. Easy transition and he's done well. Kiffin was a bad hire because he hadn't proven that he could actually be successful at a Power 5 school and I don't think he was ready for the limelight. Sarkisian might have been good....if not for the alcohol issues. Helton just didn't have the personality to keep good talent in LA and the talent drain that had been going on was too much for him to overcome.
Riley was 55-10 at OU with conference titles in his first three seasons and NY6 bowl appearances every year that he was coach....well, except maybe this year. Riley might have ended up being more like David Shaw at Stanford. Harbaugh had everything going well and Shaw kept that going for three seasons before things started to drop off. Stanford had a nice dead cat bounce in 2015 before steadily declining since then. Would that have been Riley's future at OU? We'll never know.
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