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 Times.
The question has 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.
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.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.