False Start: USC and the Continued Despair of Unfulfilled Hope
The hire of Chad Bowden is just the latest in a string of moves promising to return USC to glory. What does it mean for the Trojans if it fails like the rest of them?
When news broke on January 24th that USC Football would be hiring Chad Bowden as its long-awaited new General Manager, my first thought was: Who the hell is Chad Bowden? It didn’t take long to find the answer, and that answer was encouraging to a weary Trojan fan like myself, still shaking off another disappointing season from my beloved alma mater’s flagship program. The 30-year old son of former MLB GM Jim Bowden, Chad was coming from a similar position at Notre Dame, fresh off a loss in the national title game. He was, by all accounts, a close confidante of the Irish’s energetic young head coach Marcus Freeman, having followed him from Cincinnati to South Bend when Freeman got the defensive coordinator job that would eventually earn him the role as Brian Kelly’s successor. He was also, per Notre Dame beat writer Jack Soble, one of the people Freeman could least afford to lose in his continued efforts to bring the program its first national title since 1988. This was, naturally, music to my ears; poaching a valuable asset in the modern college football arms race is one thing, but poaching one from your rival is another entirely. If my Trojans could improve at the expense of the Irish - whose trajectory since their 2021 head coaching change has been starkly the opposite of USC’s - then all the better. It’s hard to argue with the results on the field that players Bowden helped bring to campus, both from the high school and transfer portal ranks, delivered for Notre Dame in the 2024 season and postseason despite the program having reportedly just over a third of the NIL budget of the one that eventually defeated them for the national championship. USC’s resources, while not on the level of Ohio State’s, appear to be more substantial, and the consensus seems to be that he will find his job much easier to do out West. His work was visible and impressive enough that new Michigan head coach Sherrone Moore made a run at him last year. Seemingly not content to rest on his laurels, he’s hit the ground running in assembling what already looks to be an impressive support staff, bringing another key recruiter for the Irish into the fold in former ND Director of Player Personnel Zaire Turner along with former Illinois Director of Player Personnel Dre Brown. All in all, this appears to be a smart move by USC, even though it reportedly required tripling Bowden’s Notre Dame salary to make it.
The thing is, though: USC has made a lot of seemingly-smart (and expensive) moves the last few years with little to show for it so far. One day before Brian Kelly made the surprise move from Notre Dame to LSU that left Freeman in charge, the Trojans shocked the college football world by luring Lincoln Riley away from Oklahoma to be their new head coach. At the time, it seemed to be such an improbable coup for USC that initial Tweets from reporters Bruce Feldman and Pete Thamel hinting at the eventual hire were immediately met with eye-rolling replies claiming it would never happen (including, it should be noted, Oklahoma fans who did not seem to be as ready to part with Riley as the tenor of the fanbase later on would suggest). Just seven months later, USC stunned onlookers again with the announcement that they, along with rival UCLA, would be leaving the Pac-12 for the Big Ten, where they would quickly command more television revenue and nationwide viewership than their beleaguered former conference could provide. Though the head coach hire was decidedly more feted by the sport’s commentariat than the decision for a West Coast school to join a Midwestern conference, both were seen as shrewdly aggressive steps towards renewed relevancy on the college football stage from a program that had seemingly sat back and fiddled as its empire burned to dust in the decade-plus since Pete Carroll’s departure. As I watched one of the most coveted head coaches in the sport wrap himself in cardinal and gold, amass talented transfers, and prepare my favorite team for a new life in what would become one of the two power conferences in the sport, I was ecstatic. It felt like a dream.
Just three years later, that dream feels more like a nightmare. A strong regular season in 2022 buoyed by a dazzling Heisman Trophy campaign from quarterback Caleb Williams gave way to a series of successive disappointments: a blowout loss to Utah in the Pac-12 Championship Game that kept USC from finally making an appearance in the College Football Playoff; an embarrassing collapse against Tulane in the Cotton Bowl; a letdown season in 2023 that saw five losses despite Williams remaining under center and forced Riley to make a long-overdue change at defensive coordinator; and most recently, a disastrous Big Ten debut in which Riley’s signature offense routinely stalled out or turned the ball over, effectively neutralizing the positive strides made on defense. USC’s recruiting efforts both out of high school and in the portal might be generously described as a mixed bag since Riley took over, with many prized California players continuing to leave the state for other programs and little blue-chip talent coming in to bolster the Trojans’ most pressing need, the trenches on both sides of the ball. After a wave of high-profile portal departures, the roster is suspect, including uncertainty around Riley’s calling card, the quarterback position. Far from being a Playoff contender, USC found itself below programs like Indiana and Minnesota in the pecking order of its new conference in 2024, with little to suggest that the team will ascend to the level of Big Ten peers Ohio State, Oregon, and Penn State anytime soon. Such a stark downward trajectory year over year in an industry where wins and losses drive a difference of millions of dollars in revenue would be enough for many athletic directors to make a change, particularly one who inherited the coach in question as current USC AD Jen Cohen did. But the massive contract given to Riley to entice him away from Oklahoma has made cutting bait with him a wildly expensive proposition. After a brief moment of feeling on top of the college football world, we Trojan fans have quickly found ourselves once again clinging to hope that no, actually, this latest move in hiring Bowden and his staff is finally the one that will set things right.
Of course, if USC finds itself on the hook for an onerous buyout this year, or the next, it would not be the first program to have a “slam dunk” hire not work out. Nor would it be the first blue blood to be caught up in a seemingly-endless cycle of failed head coaches. College football history is littered with periods of proud programs stuck in neutral, while outside observers sit baffled on the sidelines wondering, Why can’t they seem to figure it out? It may even seem a little silly, in the grand scheme of things, to look at a mere 20-year title drought as something to despair over while countless fans across the country have spent generations waiting to see their team reach that summit just once. Nevertheless, I find it morbidly fascinating just how many false starts - moments and hires and even full seasons that feinted at the start of something positive, only to set the team back behind the sticks - I’ve seen from the Trojans since I set foot on campus in the fall of 2010, all carrying a distinct flavor that suggests there may be something particular in the water at Heritage Hall.
I can confidently say that my dedication to Trojan Football is, without a doubt, the part of my sports fandom that I have come by most honestly. My mom went to USC as an undergraduate, and while I didn’t grow up in Southern California, the pride in that program was a regular fixture in my home. As a chubby little nerd, I stubbornly shrugged off watching Pete Carroll’s teams at their peak. I have vague memories from that time of the games being on TV, and a specific one of a segment hyping up the impending 2006 Rose Bowl featuring an exchange of words between Will Ferrell and Matthew McConaughey. Right around the time I reached high school, a switch flipped, but by then the Carroll dynasty was in its twilight years; the days of Carson Palmer and Matt Leinart had given way to John David Booty and Mark Sanchez, the national titles replaced by mere Rose Bowl victories. And yet, the allure of the program and the university behind it had grown too powerful to resist, and I eagerly chose to leave my home in the Midwest for the Southern California sunshine even as Carroll himself gave way to his former offensive coordinator, Lane Kiffin.
My freshman year at USC was Kiffin’s first season as its head coach. It was also the first year of the draconian sanctions inflicted on the program by the NCAA for the Reggie Bush scandal: a two-year bowl ban along with what would turn out to be a catastrophic loss of scholarships, all for the crime of not knowing that Bush was receiving benefits from a person unaffiliated with USC, benefits that were not in any way intended to keep USC’s star player on the field for USC. The sentiment on campus at that time was one of fierce resentment and defiance - not just of the NCAA, but also of the university and conference leadership that didn’t stand up for the program, and of those around the broader sport who were more than happy to see the once-dominant Trojans tarred and feathered as cheaters and cast unceremoniously out of college football’s upper echelon. That attitude found an ideal avatar in Kiffin, a prodigal son from the Carroll years who had flamed out as the (at the time) youngest head coach in NFL history and seemingly found new life as the head coach of the Tennessee Volunteers, only to draw enormous ire by leaving that post after just one season to take what he described as his “dream job” at USC. This brash and, at times, petulant version of Kiffin perfectly suited the mood of the fanbase, coalescing into what blogger Zack Jerome (in his now-defunct blog Lost Angeles) dubbed “Arrogant Nation.” The rest of college football hates us, the thinking went, because they don’t want to see us on top. They hate our coach for daring to spurn their beloved SEC for us. So why not embrace it?
How much of that was true, I honestly can’t say. It does seem to me that, of all the traditional blue bloods of college football, USC is undoubtedly the strangest and least accessible. It’s the only one that lies far outside the traditional hotbeds of the sport in the South and Midwest. It’s one of only two private universities in that tier, meaning enrollment is relatively small - but the other, Notre Dame, drew surplus fandom historically from being broadcast nationally on NBC as well as being the de facto team for otherwise unaffiliated American Catholics. As such, USC typically draws fierce loyalty from what alumni base it does have along with fluctuating support from around Southern California, but otherwise compels very little rooting interest. It is also, perhaps, the most volatile of the group: with 11 claimed national titles, eight Heisman Trophies, and a wealth of Rose Bowl wins, conference titles, All-Americans, and Pro Football Hall of Famers, its bona fides are clear; and yet, it has also been prone to extreme downturns. After dominant runs in the ‘60s and ‘70s, the program fell off in the ‘80s and ‘90s right as the sport was becoming more of a nationally-televised product. By the time Pete Carroll came around in 2000, it seems reasonable that fans of college football at the time might have thought of USC as a faded brand that the sport had passed by, if they thought of USC at all.
Of course, once the Carroll era got up and running, USC was impossible to ignore. From 1992 to 2002, every national championship had been won by a school from the Midwest (Nebraska, Michigan, Ohio State), South (Alabama, Oklahoma, Tennessee) or Southeast (Florida, Florida State, Miami). Suddenly, this team from Los Angeles was running roughshod over the sport - and not just their peers in the Pac-10 Conference, derided as “USC and the Nine Dwarves.” Over the years, Carroll teams notched wins over Auburn, Iowa, Michigan, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Nebraska, Ohio State, and Penn State, along with eight straight wins over rival Notre Dame. USC was arguably the defining program of the BCS era1; I have to imagine that didn’t sit too well with fans who felt - consciously or unconsciously - as if the locus of power in college football should remain firmly east of the Rocky Mountains. But for those who knew their history, this was merely the latest iteration of USC’s proud tradition - from the Howard Jones teams of the ‘30s to the John McKay and John Robinson teams of the ‘60s and ‘70s - of swinging in from out of nowhere and crashing the party.
As a naïve young man still learning the strange and unpredictable nature of college football, I was confident that this iteration wasn’t about to leave that party just yet. Kiffin’s first season in 2010 was up-and-down, marred by an end to USC’s winning streak over the Fighting Irish, but featured a promising sophomore season performance from quarterback Matt Barkley. 2011 would send the hype machine into overdrive. Barkley shined alongside star receivers Robert Woods and Marqise Lee, leading the Trojans to a 10-2 record capped off by a road upset of 4th-ranked Oregon and a 50-0 drubbing of rival UCLA. Though the postseason ban meant that USC could not compete in the inaugural Pac-12 Championship Game nor a bowl game, the announcement that Barkley would forgo the NFL Draft and return for his senior season in 2012 was enough to earn the team a preseason #1 ranking in the AP Poll. I was all in, convinced that Kiffin and his golden boy QB would deliver Arrogant Nation their 12th national championship and another Heisman to boot.
It was - emphatically - not to be. An early-season loss to Stanford2 tempered expectations, and the 2012 Trojans would ultimately go 7-5 in an unprecedented collapse for a top-ranked team. Perhaps most crushingly, Matt Barkley’s career in cardinal and gold came to a heartbreaking end as UCLA linebacker Anthony Barr drove him into the ground and separated his shoulder. If Lane Kiffin represented the impertinent heart of the Trojans during the sanctions era, Barkley represented its bright, fearless face. When those sanctions came down, he was free to take his talents to another university without having to sit out a year3, yet he chose to stay and spend two years of his college career without any hope of postseason glory; he chose again to remain for his senior season rather than leave for the Draft, ultimately tanking his stock in the process. Those decisions made him a hero among the fans. He gave us hope that the program would soldier through the harshest punishment handed out by the NCAA since the SMU Death Penalty and come out the other side undaunted and ready to compete at the highest level once again. He deserved better.
We, those proudly arrogant fans who had suddenly found ourselves and our beloved program humiliated, thought we deserved better, too. Kiffin’s failures on the field had quickly cast his aloof and puerile persona in an unflattering new light, and his support curdled as a result. A string of gaffes off the scoreboard - including a Deflategate scandal years before the term “PSI” became a buzzword among NFL talking heads - didn’t help matters. He would infamously lose his job on the tarmac after a blowout loss to Arizona State in 2013 (a road game I attended), putting the team in the hands of defensive assistant Ed Orgeron. “Coach O” had been on Carroll’s staff with Kiffin, and after an unsuccessful stint as the head coach of the Ole Miss Rebels, ended up with Kiffin at Tennessee and USC. His intense yet gregarious personality and approach to the interim role quickly endeared him to a fanbase desperate for a leader we could rally around, cresting in an upset of 5th-ranked Stanford at the Coliseum. There was something special about that time and that team, and I still remember it fondly, but the vibes came to an abrupt and ignominious end with a lopsided loss to UCLA at the Coliseum in the last game of the regular season. It was also the last game I attended as an undergraduate.4
All of this is a long, rambling way of saying that I earned my stripes as much as any fan of a blue blood program might reasonably claim to5. When I arrived on campus as a student of the University of Southern California, there were still grad students there who, as undergrads, had gotten to witness some of the greatest teams and players in the modern history of the sport in-person. By the time I left, the program felt miles away from those heights. My undergraduate career spanned the entirety of the Kiffin era, a frustrating and embarrassing tenure that not only failed to carry the torch of Trojan greatness that Pete Carroll had reignited, it saw USC’s premier status in the world of college football go up in flames. The hope that Kiffin and Barkley had brought in the wake of that 2011 season, along with the flicker of it sparked by Orgeron’s brief tenure, was gone. Orgeron was passed over for the full-time gig in favor of another former Carroll offensive assistant, Steve Sarkisian, who had injected a bit of life into a moribund Washington program. I remember at the time being decidedly underwhelmed by the hire, but willing to see it through. As it turned out, there would not be much to see; after another inconsistent debut season, Sarkisian’s unfortunate struggles with alcohol abuse led to yet another midseason firing. For the third time in six years, the USC Trojans were looking for another head man to lead them back to the promised land.
Which brings us, at last, to Clay Helton - and (I promise) nearer to my point in all this. You see, the cycle of head coaching failures that USC had found itself caught up in since Carroll’s departure was only a symptom of a much larger institutional rot. The athletic director who hired Lane Kiffin was Mike Garrett6, a former USC star player and Heisman Trophy winner who had no prior experience running an athletic department. Garrett was replaced in 2010 by Pat Haden, a former USC star player who had no prior experience running an athletic department. Haden’s tenure was not exactly covered in glory. His attempt to appeal the NCAA’s sanctions was perceived by many in the fanbase to be one of simpering contrition rather than the stalwart defense of his alma mater they had been hoping for. That appeal, of course, was denied. He then did himself no favors with his decision-making in the wake of Kiffin’s firing. The choice not to ultimately remove the interim tag on Orgeron was certainly a defensible one7, but one that also alienated both players and fans who had seen promise in the culture that the coach had managed to instill in his few weeks on the job. There was some speculation at the time that Orgeron’s blue-collar Cajun patina did not suit Haden’s patrician vision for the program. There was also a great deal of rumor surrounding who else might have been passed over for the role and why; we do know that then-Boise State head coach Chris Petersen was interviewed. The rumor mill scuttlebutt to this day is that Haden didn’t see him as a fit and chose to keep things in the Trojan family by hiring Sarkisian instead. Whether the decision was Haden’s, Petersen’s, or mutual, it is undeniable that USC ended up doing Washington a favor by paving the way for Petersen to make his way instead to Seattle, where he made the Huskies a Playoff team. Haden was eventually forced to fire Sarkisian for cause, but not before making an embarrassing spectacle of himself in a bizarre sideline incident with the referees (a thing that occasionally happens during a football game but typically does not involve a sitting athletic director) during a road game at Stanford. One wonders if perhaps he felt obligated to atone for his decision not to promote one interim head coach by promoting another in Helton. Whatever the reason, he would not have to live with the ramifications of that choice for very long, stepping down from the AD role in 2016.
Haden was replaced by Lynn Swann, a - say it with me - former USC star player who had no prior experience running an athletic department. While the university made yet another baffling decision in making yet another insular hire, on the field, it seemed like their insular coaching hire might have been an inspired one. After a disastrous neutral site opener against Alabama best remembered for an embarrassing tunnel exit that still makes the rounds on social media to this day, followed by losses to Stanford and Utah, Clay Helton benched starting quarterback Max Browne and handed the reins to dynamic redshirt freshman Sam Darnold. The offense erupted with Darnold in command, scoring 40+ points in four of his first five starts. The Trojans would not lose another game that season, capped by a thrilling Rose Bowl victory over Big Ten champion Penn State8. The following year, they won their first conference title in nearly a decade. Suddenly, and improbably, there was hope again; while Rose Bowl wins and conference championships were things USC fans had come to expect as bare minimums during the Carroll era, neither of his other successors had managed to deliver either one. Somehow, this unseasoned novice learning how to be a head coach on the job at one of college football’s premier brands accomplished both in his first two seasons.
Of course, it didn’t take too long of a look under the hood to notice that, perhaps, things weren’t running as smoothly under Helton as they appeared. Losing to Nick Saban in your first game ever as a full-time head coach is one thing; losing to Washington State as the fifth-ranked team in the country is another.9 After the Wazzu loss, the Pac-12 Championship season in 2017 was further marred by a blowout road loss to Notre Dame and a Cotton Bowl loss to Ohio State in which the Trojans scored only seven points. Helton’s growing pains were apparent, even if optimistic fans like myself didn’t want to see them, and there was very little reason to think that he had any high-profile suitors elsewhere in the college ranks or in the NFL. It was frankly baffling, then, that Swann made the decision to give Helton an extension and raise after his second season. It was a clear sign that Swann, like his employee, was not quite up to the job he was given. In 2018, the same year of his extension, Helton would reward his boss’ confidence by turning in the program’s first losing season since 2000.
And yet, hope springs eternal, and a brief flicker came again when Helton chose to move on from offensive coordinator Tee Martin and hire perhaps the most in-demand OC on the market, former Texas Tech head coach Kliff Kingsbury. In a bit of strange foreshadowing of what was to come, this hire of an Air Raid wunderkind from the Big 12 felt like a bold statement from a program that had made very few of them lately. With returning quarterback J.T. Daniels - a highly-rated prospect who had left high school early to join the Trojans and started as a true freshman in 2018 - and a receiver room that included future NFL starters Amon-Ra St. Brown, Drake London, and Michael Pittman Jr., fans were salivating at the prospect of a Kingsbury-led offense going scorched earth on the rest of the conference. Those dreams would last all of a month before Kingsbury abruptly resigned in January of 2019 to take the Arizona Cardinals head coaching job. Helton went back to the Air Raid well and hired Graham Harrell to take his place; while there was still some excitement about a change in offensive philosophy, expectations were decidedly tempered. To add injury to insult, Daniels suffered an ACL tear in the very first game of the season and would not play another game for the Trojans. Backup QB Kedon Slovis had a fairly impressive year in his absence, but the team went 8-5, capped by a loss to Iowa in the Holiday Bowl in which they gave up 49 points to the now-infamous Brian Ferentz offense.
Earlier that same year, the Varsity Blues scandal had rocked the athletic department, and Swann resigned from his post in September plagued by allegations that he had been derelict in his duties; it didn’t take much reading between the lines to infer that he had been more or less forced out by the university’s new president, Carol Folt. This is when things seemed to be taking a turn for the better in a much quieter yet more substantial fashion. Folt was brought in to clean up the messes left by her predecessor, Max Nikias: a string of scandals both inside and outside the athletic department - Varsity Blues merely being the most recent at the time - that had stained the proud university’s reputation. Meanwhile, Helton’s reputation amongst the fans and the broader college football landscape was also tanking. Despite going undefeated in the COVID-shortened 2020 regular season, it was obvious to anyone watching that his team was a paper tiger, made plain by a loss to Oregon in the Pac-12 Championship Game. Amidst all this, Folt had plucked Cincinnati athletic director Mike Bohn for the same position at USC. After decades of leadership from an insular boys’ club of former Trojan greats with few other qualifications to their name, the USC athletic department was being run by an actual athletic director. Though his prior resume was unspectacular, here at last seemed to be an adult in the room with the requisite experience - and more strikingly, no previous ties to the program. Bohn said all the right things in his introductory press conference, and his administration quickly set about doing work behind the scenes to repair the program’s infrastructure that had gradually decayed under his forerunners. And yet, as his tenure approached nearly two full years, he hadn’t yet satisfied the fanbase’s most urgent desire: fire Clay Helton and replace him with a winner.
The Lincoln Riley hire changed everything. Like Bohn, Riley was an outsider; he was not a former USC player, nor had he ever served on a previous USC staff. For an athletic department that had, for years, seemingly operated with a Mafia-like obsession towards keeping things in the family, this felt like a seismic shift. After months of half-joking speculation that USC would do what USC does and hire a former player (Jeff Fisher, Jack Del Rio) or staffer (Hue Jackson) who had definitively proven their lack of head coaching prowess but, hey, they knew the Fight Song, the Trojans went out and did something completely different: they hired an in-demand, established head coach who had never worn cardinal and gold. It’s hard to overstate just what a breath of fresh air this was for those of us who had watched in frustration as “USC guys” at both the administrative and coaching levels failed spectacularly time and time again. If the definition of insanity is attempting the same thing over and over and expecting different results, then the Trojan athletic department I’d grown accustomed to had been certifiable. Now, it seemed, they had finally broken the cycle.
The administration clearly knew what they’d pulled off, and weren’t afraid to spike the football in the aftermath. In the introductory press conference and across social media, the program trumpeted Riley’s arrival as the dawn of a new age in Troy. Sound clips of Riley saying the Coliseum would be the “Mecca of college football” and Paul Finebaum10 declaring that Riley would win a national title at USC spread far and wide. At the time, none of it seemed like hyperbole. Even neutral observers who had watched Clay Helton’s teams stumble through season after season with no clear identity and a lack of basic fundamentals were of the mind that it wouldn’t take a genius to make USC a national power again; they just needed a head coach who knew what the hell he was doing. Riley, everyone agreed, sure seemed like he knew what he was doing, and he ran a dynamic and potent offensive scheme that would no doubt attract both viewers and talented players11. What’s more, he was leaving a seemingly comfortable position in Norman, the hand-picked heir apparent of a beloved head coach at a program with a sustained history of success and fan support. Certainly he must have seen something among the damaged goods out West to make him believe he could accomplish greater things at USC than he could at Oklahoma. So why shouldn’t the athletic department pound their chest a bit?
As it turned out, they were doing more than that behind the scenes. A few months after their blockbuster hire, USC dropped another bombshell: they and UCLA would be moving to the Big Ten. Enough virtual ink has been spilled on the confounding and wantonly destructive nature of conference realignment over the last few years that I don’t feel the need to dwell too much on the particulars. But for many of us fans, this move felt like the university once again flexing muscles that appeared to have withered away over the previous decade. Under the leadership of former commissioner Larry Scott, the Pac-12 had become the poster child for major conference mismanagement. The debacle that was the Pac-12 Network, in particular, had crippled the conference’s television revenue at a time when that revenue was becoming vitally important to a program’s ability to compete at the highest levels. With Texas and Oklahoma set to leave for the SEC, it was becoming abundantly clear that the gap between college football’s haves (the SEC, the Big Ten, and Notre Dame) and have-nots (everyone else) was only going to get wider. Was I happy to see decades of tradition and conference rivalries cast aside so callously? Of course not. I wished earnestly to live in a world in which USC had access to the same resources that Alabama and Ohio State did while remaining in a West Coast league, competing with the same conference peers that had been interwoven in ways both good and ill into the rich tapestry of the program’s history12. But this is not the world we live in, and I had come to the reluctant conclusion that this move - however pernicious and geographically nonsensical it might have been - was a necessary evil carried out by an athletic department that had so often failed to do what was necessary.
The result of all this was that, in a matter of months, USC went from being a punchline and an afterthought to one of the most villainous programs in the country. There’s been a bit of revisionist history out of Norman regarding their feelings about Riley’s abrupt departure; while they may earnestly be glad to be rid of him now, in the immediate aftermath, it was clear that they felt betrayed by someone they thought they would proudly call their own for years to come. The vitriol that flowed in those early days felt far more like that of a jilted ex-lover than that of a fanbase ready to move on. That anger only intensified when players abandoned Oklahoma for USC as well - Caleb Williams, of course, but also prized high school commits like Malachi Nelson and Makai Lemon. Transfers from elsewhere soon followed, most notably star receiver Jordan Addison from Pittsburgh, drawing the ire of Panthers head coach Pat Narduzzi along with criticism from various other corners of college football that took umbrage with how Riley was going about his rebuild. All of this along with USC’s decision to leave the Pac-12 (and take the valuable Los Angeles television market with them) just as the conference’s new leadership was seeking a fresh TV deal had gotten the attention of the college football world at large. And we fans loved it, for we were sure that all of that invective and admonishment directed our way was born of the same thing that, deep down, fueled all of the sport’s rage and fury: envy. It felt, in some ways, like the wayward spirit of Arrogant Nation that had once thumped its chest in defiance of the rest of the sport only to fall flat on its face had finally found a home that could sustain it. Hope - the same hope that launched a thousand “You Can’t Sanction the Endzone” shirts, “Fight the Fuck On” stickers, and “We are so back” Tweets - had returned to Heritage Hall in full force. Like the battered and defeated Trojans of the Aeneid, it seemed that, at long last, we had found our Rome.
Needless to say, new pratfalls ensued - including, it should be noted, Bohn resigning in disgrace after allegations of misconduct - and the “destined reign of Troy” feels as far away as it did at various points throughout the Kiffin, Sarkisian, and Helton years. But unlike those cases, the problem here seems much harder to diagnose. It’s easy to point to Kiffin’s immaturity and the handicap of the sanctions, to Sark’s unfortunate demons, and to Helton’s lack of experience and say that each of these tenures was doomed to fail. If Riley can’t turn things around, the question of why he didn’t work out and who USC could turn to in his stead if they want to avoid yet another failed tenure is both difficult and troubling, because this was the hire that was supposed to fix everything. Lincoln Riley in 2021 was easily the most qualified head coaching candidate USC had hired since (at least) John Robinson. He was neither a washed-up retread nor an unproven commodity, with a promising track record and enough youth and competitive fire to address the flaws that had thus far kept him from winning on the biggest stages. He was everything USC’s false prophets of hope - Haden and Kiffin, Sarkisian and Swann, Helton and Kingsbury - were not. In short, he seemed to be the ideal course correction for a program that had, for years, refused to look for answers outside its own fold and suffered for it. How on Earth is he now on the hot seat entering Year 4?
It’s tempting to say simply that he is stubborn - stubborn with his coordinator hires, stubborn with his playcalling, stubborn in his approach to recruiting, stubborn with the media - and his chickens are finally coming home to roost in a way they inevitably would have at Oklahoma had he stayed there. And perhaps this is true. Certainly the decision to bring Alex Grinch with him from Norman rather than use his move to Los Angeles as an opportunity to wipe the slate clean was one that even the most optimistic observers looked askance at. And the decision to retain Grinch after the failures of the 2022 season sowed the first serious seeds of doubt about Riley’s USC tenure. But credit where it is due: when the root cause of the defensive woes became impossible to ignore, Riley did what he had to, and then took his task to upgrade the defense seriously. He poached a rising star from across town in UCLA defensive coordinator D’Anton Lynn, and filled the staff out with a former Saban assistant (Doug Belk), an FCS national champion head coach (Matt Entz), and a celebrated defensive line coach from the NFL (Eric Henderson). This offseason, when Entz left to be the head coach of Fresno State, Riley went out and replaced him with a respected NFL coaching veteran in Rob Ryan. After assistant Taylor Mays left for a job at Washington, Riley brought in cornerbacks coach Trovon Reed, a fierce recruiter from SEC country. And when Penn State allegedly started circling Lynn (a Penn State alum) as a target for their vacant defensive coordinator role13, Riley got him an extension and raise to keep him in Los Angeles. The issue of playcalling - and game management in general - is still a huge question mark, but there does seem to be something of a shift in offensive philosophy brewing: after two years of fans watching in bewilderment as Riley abandoned the run game at the worst possible moments, there has been a clear increased emphasis on the running back room this offseason.
The issue of recruiting is a bit more complicated - and perhaps indicative that the problems at USC go beyond its head coach’s purview. Certainly two lackluster seasons on the field do not inspire much confidence among recruits in a program that has not won on the biggest stage since before most of them were even born. And Riley’s efforts until very recently have been less focused on his own backyard than many in the fanbase would like them to be. But USC - a program that once practically recruited itself - may be a more difficult place to entice talent to in the modern era than many people realize. Before the dawn of social media, even USC’s most mediocre coaches could draw a fence around Southern California and lay claim to the region’s most prized prospects. Now, players can fill their feeds with highlight reels, and a torrent of coaches and recruiters from across the country will flood their DMs. To keep talent from leaving the state, Riley needs something more to offer than just proximity to family and the opportunity to keep playing in 75-degree weather. Poaching players from talent-rich yet competitive regions like Georgia and Texas is even harder, as Riley’s laundry list of decommitments at USC can attest to. And the NIL era - while a net positive for student athletes - has cranked up the difficulty settings. It’s a rather bitter irony that Trojan fans have had to live with the last several years: while countless uninformed followers of the sport still labor under the delusion that USC has been hurling bags of cash at players since the pre-NIL days thanks to the Reggie Bush scandal, the program continues to be outbid for recruits - and it may not be for lack of trying.
The rumblings of USC’s NIL deficiencies are both baffling and worrisome. Despite all the university’s crowing about its long list of wealthy alumni, it is hard to identify a single one (save, perhaps, for Rick Caruso) who seems to be publicly invested in the program, leaving many of us to wonder: where is our Phil Knight? Oregon and its seemingly-bottomless well of Nike money have been the poster child for NIL-era roster-building, and Eugene has usurped Los Angeles as the premier destination for talent on the West Coast as a result. Elsewhere in the Big Ten, Ohio State (per their own athletic director) allegedly spent upwards of $20 million on what eventually became a national champion roster. That figure will likely look like a relative bargain in a few years. Building a team that can compete at the highest levels is an arms race that the Trojans just don’t seem equipped to win right now. Part of it is that they have been behind the curve at every turn: their first attempt at an in-house solution, BLVD, was an embarrassment; they took too long to wrangle all of their competing collectives into a single entity; even this GM hire, impressive as it is, probably came at least a year later than it should have14. Perhaps there was some lingering institutional unease about potentially running afoul of the NCAA again; perhaps the issues run deeper. Regardless, USC’s willingness to now empty its pockets for a coach like D’Anton Lynn and a GM like Chad Bowden is encouraging. But if the administration can’t convince donors and boosters to empty theirs in turn in order to acquire talent15, then it may all be for naught.
Of course, getting talent on campus is only half the battle. When Oregon and Ohio State met again on the field in this year’s Rose Bowl, it was clear which team had grown and developed since their regular-season meeting and which hadn’t. Developing the players you have, and building a culture that gets those players pulling in the same direction when the lights are the brightest, is essential to accomplishing the goals that a program like USC has in mind for itself. Three years in, it isn’t totally clear what Riley’s vision for culture and development is. We’ve heard all the standard buzzwords - physicality, discipline, toughness, etc. - but the results on the field speak for themselves. The one positive cultural indicator I can point to is that the 2024 Trojans seemingly never outright quit16, even as they and their coach made catastrophic in-game mistakes. That’s certainly something to admire and build on, but why does it feel like there is still so much more culture-building left to be done after three years? It’s not as if the roster is still littered top to bottom with Helton players; this is Riley’s team now. How would any reasonably-informed outsider even begin to define its culture? Worse still, how would such a person go about defining its identity? The most successful programs at all levels of the sport have a clear identity. Georgia under Kirby Smart has an identity. Utah under Kyle Whittingham has an identity. Michigan under Jim Harbaugh had an identity. Even Oklahoma under Lincoln Riley had an identity, and with the 2022 Trojans, it seemed as though Riley had ported over that identity (for good and for ill) almost seamlessly. That identity no longer exists, and what it might be now is unclear. This is not to say that programs must keep doing things a certain way for the sake of being true to themselves; Alabama under Nick Saban famously had to reinvent itself, moving from a plodding, smash-mouth offense to a dynamic system incorporating spread, screen, and RPO elements (crafted, of course, by our old friends Lane Kiffin and Steve Sarkisian). It’s certainly possible that Riley can re-tool his offense in such a way that, paired with a much more sound defense than the ones he had at Oklahoma and his first two seasons at USC, gives the team some semblance of an identity that leads to consistent success. But again: why didn’t that process start in Year 1? And is it too late to set a new tone?
With all of that being said, if you were to ask me today if USC should regret its coaching and conference moves, and if the hope has fully curdled once again into despair, my answer would be (perhaps, once again, to my own eventual detriment): not yet. Trojan fans need not look further than our new conference to find inspiration. At Michigan, Jim Harbaugh was seen as a perfect fit when he was hired at the end of 2014 - a “slam dunk” hire just as Riley once was. Like Riley, Harbaugh saw some immediate success with the Wolverines, taking a squad that had gone 5-7 the year prior and delivering a 10-win season in Year 1, followed by another in Year 2. But as the years went on, Harbaugh’s Michigan was seen as good but not great; they weren’t winning conference championships, nor were they notching any wins in their rivalry with Ohio State, a game they hadn’t won since 2011. By the time Michigan suffered an upset loss to Michigan State in late October of 2021, many both inside and outside the Wolverine fold were openly decrying Harbaugh’s tenure as a noble failure. All of that changed less than a month later when Michigan shocked the Buckeyes and won the Big Ten East. They would go on to win the conference championship game and make the College Football Playoff. Harbaugh would not lose to Ohio State again, and capped his tenure two years later with a national championship before returning to the NFL. Though he had to take a pay cut to do it, Harbaugh ultimately rewarded his alma mater’s patience. As for moving conferences? Well, the team that won the Big Ten in 2024 just demonstrated that it isn’t impossible for a West Coast program to be competitive in this primarily Midwest league.
Strangely, though, the closest comparison Riley may have in the sport currently is to Harbaugh’s former rival, Ryan Day. Like Riley, Day was (as infamously noted by Harbaugh himself) “born on third base,” a bright offensive coordinator taking the reigns from a national champion head coach at a blue-blood program with a track record of consistency. Both coaches saw immediate success but always fell short of a national championship. And by the end of the 2024 season, both coaches were wearing the patience of their respective fanbases thin. In Day’s case, it was a fourth consecutive loss to Michigan - a significantly diminished version of Michigan at that. Had it been possible to, at that moment, poll Trojan and Buckeye fans on whether or not they wanted to see their current head coach in charge of their team next season, Day - despite a 69-10 overall record as head coach of Ohio State - likely would have fared even worse than Riley. And yet, thanks to four straight performances in the expanded 12-team Playoff in which the Buckeyes finally looked like the team everyone thought they would be going into the 2024 season, Ryan Day seems to have completely reversed his fortunes by delivering Ohio State their first national championship in 10 years. Of course, he has done all of this at the same station that gave him his first head coaching job, whereas Riley is wearing out his welcome after only three years in a new role by thus far failing to replicate even the moderate highs of his previous one.
The shifting Ryan Day narrative was merely the capstone on a season that felt like a strange convergence of USC ghosts past, present, and (perhaps) future. It started in Las Vegas when Lincoln Riley’s Trojans faced Brian Kelly’s LSU Tigers. Riley and Kelly’s paths had been eerily similar since taking their respective current jobs merely one day apart back in 2021. Like Riley, Kelly had voluntarily left another blue blood program that seemed to be in better shape than the one he was taking over. Both coaches delivered immediately promising results in Year 1 and underperformed in Year 2, hampered by poor defenses. Both had thus far failed to deliver on the recruiting front at the level their respective fanbases expected them to, but had managed to bring in a star transfer quarterback who would go on to win a Heisman Trophy. Going into the game, both were replacing their respective Heisman-winners with quarterbacks they hadn’t recruited who had nevertheless patiently waited for their opportunity to start, and both were replacing their defensive coordinators with rising stars plucked from within their own conferences in D’Anton Lynn and Blake Baker respectively. USC would win a thriller, sparking false hope that the Trojans might excel in their inaugural Big Ten season even without Caleb Williams while furthering Kelly’s own micro-narrative of flopping in neutral site season openers. As in his last year at Oklahoma, Riley made a quarterback change midseason, though Jayden Maiava would not prove to have as much immediate success as Caleb Williams did. As USC floundered through a string of close conference losses, elsewhere in the sport, two former Trojan coaches were thriving. Though Lane Kiffin’s Ole Miss Rebels ultimately fell short of their Playoff aspirations, they remained in the conversation much further into the season than USC did, posting a 10-3 record including a win over eventual SEC champion Georgia. Meanwhile, Steve Sarkisian’s Texas Longhorns made it as far as the CFP semifinal, putting up the toughest fight that Ohio State would face throughout the Playoff. Riley’s former program in Norman stumbled to the same win-loss record USC had in the regular season, leaving Sooner fans wondering if they actually were as better off with Brent Venables as they once thought. As for the coach who replaced Kelly? An early season loss to Northern Illinois at home to go along with home losses to Marshall and Stanford in Year 1 sure made it seem as if Marcus Freeman was headed down the path of Clay Helton, a “player’s coach” and all-around nice guy who was unfortunately out of his depth learning head coaching on the job at a major program. But his Fighting Irish would not lose again until the national title game, and while some of his decisions in that game suggest he is still very much learning, his current trajectory seems much more promising than that of Riley, Kelly, or Venables. Far from the Playoff, USC’s postseason would take them back where they started, facing an SEC team in Las Vegas. Their opponent this time was Texas A&M, still shaking itself loose from the failed tenure of Jimbo Fisher. Like Riley, Fisher had been the successful head coach of a major program in Florida State, and was given a sizeable contract to leave that post. The extension of that contract (including a massive buyout clause) quickly became an infamous albatross for the Aggies after back-to-back disappointing seasons in 2021 and 2022; when the university finally had enough in 2023, they were forced to pay him the largest buyout in college football history. Though Riley would move to 2-0 against the SEC on the season with a win over new Aggies head coach Mike Elko, he would enter the offseason with more questions than answers.
Where does all of this leave USC and Lincoln Riley? I honestly don’t know. Barring any unforeseen developments (certainly not out of the question in this sport), Riley will lead the Trojans in 2025, a season in which they will not be expected by very many to compete for the conference crown or a spot in the Playoff. Yes, the retention of Lynn was a crucial positive. And the GM hire isn’t just promising for the long-term recruiting potential; it also gives Riley and his assistants the opportunity to focus on coaching while Bowden and his staff do the heavy lifting when it comes to roster building and retention. But it isn’t readily apparent what precisely Riley is planning on doing with that renewed focus to correct the more immediate mistakes of 2024. And while he isn’t exactly known for being transparent about his program or process, it would be nice for us anxious observers to get some sort of indication of self-reflection from a man who is increasingly starting to sound like his predecessor in his postgame press conferences. It doesn’t need to happen overnight; Jim Harbaugh and Ryan Day proved that patience can be rewarded, and good head coaches at their lowest can flip the script, sometimes even within the same season. And to be clear: I still want Lincoln Riley to succeed at USC, and I’m content to wait as long as Michigan and Ohio State fans did if there’s a national championship at the end of that particular road. But if he doesn’t, I’m sure I’m not the only Trojan fan concerned that the next hire will merely be another patch fix from an athletic department that fundamentally does not understand how to be competitive in today’s college football landscape, even under the watchful eye of what finally appears be a sensible and uncomplicated athletic director in Jen Cohen.
On the off chance that anyone in Heritage Hall is reading, I’ll leave them with this: in the fall of 2021, I was so hungry for any intel surrounding the head coaching search that I bit the bullet and briefly subscribed to an insider site with an accompanying message board, and would trawl the site and board daily for insights. As it turned out, there ultimately wasn’t much valuable information going around that pointed to the eventual hire, even behind the paywall. However, in the waning moments of the evening before Riley’s hire, a rumor popped up there that USC was prepared to make an offer to Iowa State head coach Matt Campbell. To this day, I have no idea how true this was; by all accounts, Lincoln Riley had been the administration’s main target for weeks, and they were merely waiting for his season at Oklahoma to end before formally engaging with him. But there certainly had to be backup candidates in mind, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Campbell was indeed their fallback if Riley said no. Nevertheless, I went into that Sunday having more or less talked myself into Campbell being the guy, only to be overjoyed to learn that it would be Riley instead. In retrospect, however, maybe what USC needed at that moment was not just a flashy outsider, but a proven program-builder like Campbell, a coach who brought unprecedented levels of success to a program that had never had it and, in the years since, has demonstrated an ability to reinvent and resurge when things start to dip - and do so without the administrative or NIL resources of an Ohio State or an Oregon. Maybe they still do.
A bitter irony, in retrospect, as the College Football Playoff that replaced the BCS was tailor-made to reward teams like Carroll’s, which often had an unfortunate habit of turning in one inexplicably poor performance that would eventually render an otherwise sterling season undeserving of a spot in the BCS National Championship Game.
While USC’s decline as the preeminent West Coast power is generally contrasted with the rise of the Oregon Ducks, it shouldn’t be forgotten that the program that most bedeviled the Trojans during the later years under Pete Carroll and the tenure of Lane Kiffin was actually Stanford. Under Jim Harbaugh, the Cardinal delivered a stunning upset in 2007 followed by four straight wins from 2009 to 2012 (including an agonizing triple-overtime duel between Andrew Luck and Matt Barkley at the Coliseum in 2011 that ended when USC running back Curtis McNeal fumbled going into the endzone). The streak held such sway over the psyche of the fanbase that when it was finally broken in 2013, fans rushed the field. Though I was in attendance, I refused to participate, having been taught by my proud mother that rushing the field was beneath a program of USC’s stature.
As was typically required of a non-grad transfer at that time. My, how things have changed.
I did not attend USC’s bowl game that year, a 45-20 victory over the Derek Carr-led Fresno State Bulldogs in Las Vegas. When Orgeron was passed over for the permanent head coaching gig at USC, he resigned, and a little-known offensive assistant by the name of Clay Helton was put in charge for this game. Don’t quote me on this, but I keenly recall a sadly ironic statement from Helton at the time along the lines of him wanting to go down as “the only 1-0 head coach is USC history.”
Believe me, I recognize how this all might ring a bit hollow for a proud fan of a perennial P4 bottom-feeder or a middling FCS team. There are fans out there who would die happy if they got to see their program have even just one season like USC had in 2011 or 2016. Sports misery is a wide spectrum, and I can only speak to my place on it.
It should be acknowledged that Garrett also hired Pete Carroll, but only after striking out on several other candidates. Carroll was best known at that point for his short-lived tenure as the head coach of the New England Patriots, and the hire was roundly criticized at the time. Blind squirrel, nut, etc.
I defended that decision at the time, and I think I still do. Orgeron, of course, would once again have a stint as an interim head coach that successfully earned him the full-time job, this time at LSU, where he would win a national title in 2019. He was also fired from that same job two years later. My gut tells me that USC’s current national title and head coach counts would be no different in the alternate reality in which Orgeron got the job than in the one we’re living in now.
I was fortunate enough to attend this Rose Bowl, and it was the most exhilarating experience I’ve ever had at a football game. For whatever other feelings I might have about Clay Helton and his tenure as USC’s head coach, I’m truly grateful to have witnessed that game in-person.
The Cougars, it should be said, ended up having one of their best years under head coach Mike Leach in 2017, thanks in large part to a strong defense led by…Alex Grinch.
Once again, my, how things have changed.
None of this is to say that there were not concerns from the very beginning about Riley’s curious decision to bring defensive coordinator Alex Grinch with him despite the lackluster results he had delivered at Oklahoma to date. For all of his accomplishments in his young head coaching career, the book on Riley at that point was that he was still a decent defense away from jumping into the ranks of the elite. There was just so much enthusiasm for the seemingly ideal marriage of coach and program that those concerns were either muted or hand-waved altogether.
Frankly, I would also love to live in a world in which the Rose Bowl still meant something, and in which the sport’s unnatural obsession with determining a “one true champion” and the television networks’ craven desire for more product had not coalesced into the senseless behemoth that is the College Football Playoff, the very idea of which runs counter to so many things that make college football the unique and wonderful sport that it is…but I digress.
I don’t know what the reality of that situation was; if Lynn was, in fact, their first choice, it’s interesting to consider the implications given that Penn State ended up “settling” for Jim Knowles, fresh off winning a national championship at Ohio State.
To be fair, they did make a run at Alabama GM Courtney Morgan, but that was in August of last year; after such a late attempt, USC had to put their search on hold until another season had come and gone.
The House v. NCAA settlement will certainly factor into all of this, but the athlete payments that come out of it will undoubtedly be a baseline rather than a cap; the most successful programs will continue to be the ones that weaponize third-party payments most effectively.
Bear Alexander notwithstanding. Have fun with him, Duck fans!