There comes a point in every failed coaching tenure when you have to ask the question: If not now, when?
Lincoln Riley is squarely in the middle of that conversation.
It is Year 5 at Southern Cal. He has been given everything he needs to win from a massive contract to a well-funded roster to a palatial new football facility. He spent the offseason talking about having alignment with the administration and a roster capable of winning in the Big Ten.
He hired his third defensive coordinator in Gary Patterson, who happens to be one of the greatest defensive minds in the history of the sport. He has an experienced quarterback in senior Jayden Maiava. And on Saturday, he had Oregon at home playing without its starting quarterback for the entire second half.
When’s it ever going to be enough for Riley at USC? Or, more to the point, when is USC going to say it’s had enough?
The evidence is in. USC fans don’t need any more to render a verdict — and it is beyond a reasonable doubt.
USC’s 41-27 loss to Oregon on Saturday was a moment of clarity because it exposed that for all the talk about what’s different at USC, not much has really changed. Whether it’s Caleb Williams or Jayden Maiava playing quarterback for Riley, it’s the same product year after year after year.
And it’s not good enough to win at the level Riley was hired to achieve.
There will be plenty of time to dissect why it’s turned out this way and how both the Trojans and Riley can unwind themselves from this marriage. But when you knock out Oregon quarterback Dante Moore on a dirty hit and then celebrate it going to the sideline, as USC’s Desman Stephens did before he got tossed from the game, there should be no excuse or tolerance for allowing 28 second-half points and 289 passing yards to backup Dylan Raiola.
It’s even worse, though, that nobody’s surprised. In fact, it’s almost expected at this point because USC’s big issues don’t change from year to year.
It doesn’t matter if it’s Patterson or Alex Grinch or D’Anton Lynn, who have all had success elsewhere. You can even go back to Oklahoma, and it was the same problem. Season after season, Riley’s teams have a brand — and that brand is needing a Heisman Trophy-winning college quarterback like Baker Mayfield or Kyler Murray to score on darn near every possession.
How do you win that way over the long haul? It doesn’t work.
And the only common denominator is Riley.
Lincoln Riley and the Trojans came up short against Oregon yet again on Saturday. (Kiyoshi Mio-Imagn Images)
While it’s unreasonable to write off the season for a 4-1 team with this much talent, USC still has to play at Penn State, Wisconsin, Indiana and UCLA with a home game against Ohio State. If the Trojans can get to the CFP for the first time under Riley with that schedule, we’ll do all the mea culpas.
But the way they play football — remember, USC gave up 35 points to Rutgers last week! — does not lend itself to running the table. That’s why the Oregon game feels like such a referendum on the Riley era. When you have that kind of opportunity at home and don’t cash it with so much is riding on this season, it’s the most disappointing moment of his tenure.
And that’s why USC reigns as America’s most miserable fan base in Week 4.
ACC: Four games into Tosh Lupoi’s tenure at Cal, fans are starting to notice that their head coach is going through some growing pains. One example occurred at the end of the half Friday night in a 24-10 loss to Clemson when Lupoi could have called a quick timeout after a sack and gotten the ball back with about 40 seconds on the clock. But Lupoi hesitated for about 15 seconds — he admitted his mistake after the game — and cost Cal a chance to make anything out of that possession. It probably wasn’t the difference in winning or losing, but it is indicative of a guy who wasn’t quite ready for all the things you deal with as a head coach. Here’s the thing, though. Cal knew that — or at least, it should have. Lupoi, a former Cal player, got the job because his strength is recruiting. As a result, everything around him should be oriented to helping him as a tactician. That’s where you have to question both Lupoi and general manager Ron Rivera for hiring 30-year-old Jordan Somerville to be the offensive coordinator. Somerville’s previous job was three seasons as the assistant to Tampa Bay Bucs quarterback coach Thad Lewis. Even if you think Somerville is a future star in the profession, that’s a big step up in responsibility and a weird fit alongside a first-time head coach. It also seems to have had a negative effect on promising quarterback Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele, who has not taken the expected leap as a sophomore. Lupoi needs to be insulated by experience or it could be a rough ride until he figures this head coaching thing out.
Big 12: A quick recap of Colorado‘s 23-13 loss to Baylor would include several grisly details, including quarterback Julian Lewis getting benched, an offense that ran the ball 39 times for 2.1 yards per carry, getting stuffed three straight times from midfield in the second quarter and allowing four different punt returns of more than 15 yards. But none of that was quite as ridiculous as Deion Sanders’ assessment of his team, which is now 2-2 after last week’s stunning 41-7 loss at Northwestern. “We’re better than this,” Sanders said. “I know it’s a tremendous letdown last week but we flushed it and we found out last night that team is better than you think. But we’re better than this. It seems as though we’re better than our opponents but the score just not dictating that. And that’s the fascinating thing about it. We’ve got to find out why.” If you’re a Colorado fan, you have to be wondering what that even means. Colorado fans watched those games. What happened in either of them to suggest that Colorado is “better” than either Northwestern or Baylor? Better how? Are the players better? Is the coaching better? Or maybe the only thing that’s actually better is the delusion about where Colorado’s program is at right now. Even Colorado’s big win in the season opener against Georgia Tech is looking less impressive now that we know Georgia Tech has clearly declined significantly from a year ago. With Colorado’s toughest Big 12 home games against Texas Tech and Utah coming up in the next few weeks, this could get away from Sanders quickly and spark a fresh round of speculation about whether he’s going to be there for the long haul.
Colorado coach Deion Sanders reacts during the second half of a loss to Baylor on Saturday. (Scott Wachter/Getty Images)
SEC: Texas A&M made the College Football Playoff last season, and no one can take that away from them. But just 10 months later, this doesn’t look like the same program. Was former offensive coordinator (now current Kansas State head coach) Collin Klein really that indispensable for quarterback Marcel Reed, who has struggled badly this year? Was demoting defensive coordinator Jay Bateman, causing him to leave for Kentucky, a gaffe by head coach Mike Elko? Or was Texas A&M’s 11-0 start to last season a bit of a mirage, the product of arguably the easiest SEC schedule we may ever see in the College Football Playoff era? It’s probably all of the above and then some, but what we know for sure is the wheels came off the wagon Saturday night in a 35-6 loss at LSU. If Elko was looking for his team to respond one week after a shocking home loss to Kentucky, it now heads home with all kinds of questions and its CFP hopes effectively over. Elko is somewhat protected by a six-year, $69 million contract extension that he signed last fall during the euphoria of the Aggies reaching No. 3 in the polls in mid-November. Then again, this is the same school that fired Jimbo Fisher with $77.5 million left on his contract. With oil trading at around $100 a barrel these days, don’t eliminate any possibility if Texas A&M’s biggest boosters are angry enough. Going back to the end of last season, the Aggies are 1-4 in their last five against FBS opponents. Individually, they are not necessarily awful losses. But the idea that A&M is an ascendent power under Elko, which made all the sense in the world midway through last season, now seems like a fantasy. In retrospect, four of A&M’s seven SEC wins last season came against teams that fired their coaches. And that doesn’t even include an improbable win over 4-8 South Carolina in which they trailed by 27 points at halftime. It all came together for Elko a year ago, but now it’s coming undone.
Group of Six: As the season goes along, keep an eye on San Diego State. Sean Lewis, the head coach, is a bit of a media darling because he got the job at Kent State very young (he was 32 at the tie), went 24-31 at a place that hadn’t been very successful and left that job in 2023 to be the offensive coordinator at Colorado. When Coach Prime stripped his playcalling duties in November of that season, it was painted as unjust. Lewis, however, came out smelling like a rose when San Diego State hired him weeks later to be head coach. But now three years in, Lewis may have the most disappointing team in the Group of Six. Aztec fans are furious, and rightly so, after a 41-16 loss to Toledo. San Diego State now enters Pac-12 play at 1-3, having scored just 39 total points in its three losses to UCLA, James Madison and the Rockets. It may turn out that San Diego State has simply played a difficult schedule, as those opponents are a combined 11-1. But the new Pac-12 needs SDSU to be a premiere program as it relaunches the league, and so far the Aztecs aren’t holding up their end of the bargain.
Mike Locksley: It’s all over but the buyout. Locksley has had plenty of time to get Maryland into a more competitive place in the Big Ten, but a 54-3 loss at home to UCLA in a stadium that emptied out early Saturday feels definitive. That doesn’t necessarily mean Maryland will make the move right away, but you can’t survive a 51-point loss to UCLA in Year 8 when you’re already on the hot seat after consecutive 4-8 seasons. If anything, Locksley has gotten more rope than most coaches would because he is so well-connected as a recruiter in the mid-Atlantic and Maryland wanted to see if increasing investment in the roster rather than paying a big coaching buyout would make a difference. But, alas, consecutive home losses to Virginia Tech and UCLA — both with first-year coaches that would have been logical Maryland candidates had they fired Locksley last year — is pretty much the last straw for a fan base that can no longer make excuses for his 17-49 record in the Big Ten.
Brent Venables: The offensive dysfunction at Oklahoma is startling. In three games against power conference opponents, the Sooners have scored a mere 37 total points. And nearly a third of those came in the second half of Saturday’s 41-13 loss to Georgia after the Bulldogs had throttled down with a big lead. While Oklahoma has a bye week to regroup, fans have every right to dread what’s coming on Oct. 10 against Texas’ loaded defense. How are the Sooners going to score on those guys? Funny things tend to happen in the Red River Rivalry, but if Oklahoma plays as badly in that game as it has the last two years against Texas (outscored by a combined 57-9), Venables — who just got a contract extension before the season — is going to be under pressure to make big changes. Offensive coordinator Ben Arbuckle and quarterback John Mateer came to Oklahoma as a package deal from Washington State and looked like a dynamic combination early last season. But for whatever reason, Mateer seems to have regressed and everything looks really hard for this offense whether they’re playing a championship-level defense like Georgia’s or a good Group of Six defense like New Mexico‘s.
Curt Cignetti: We have gotten to the point with Indiana that when it survives a close call, as it did Friday night in a 29-23 win over Northwestern, the group chats start to get a little angsty and extra punctuation starts to show up in message board threads like “WHAT’S WRONG???????” This was, more or less, the Alabama football experience starting in about 2012 until Nick Saban retired and every so often he’d have to scold the fan base back to reality. Cignetti is well aware of how this works because after the game, he got to the press conference and offered the following: “It’s a good win cause you can lose those games very, very easily. I’m sure everybody’s disappointed because they still have the national championship hangover but I can’t do anything about that,” he said, finishing the thought with a bit of an evil laugh as he chomped on a wad of gum. Cignetti is right, but once you give fans a taste of Michelin-star cooking, it’s hard to go back to fast food.
Matt Campbell: In the fourth quarter of Penn State’s 24-20 loss at home to Wisconsin, the Nittany Lions’ offense had four consecutive three-and-outs and their defense gave up drives of 75 and 85 yards in the final seven minutes. Other than that, everything went great in Campbell’s first Big Ten game. Honeymoon? What honeymoon? Campbell has an outstanding track record at Iowa State and Toledo, but he was something like Penn State’s 12th choice for the job after its long coaching search went sideways last fall. Everyone knows that, which does not make things easy for him in earning the fan base’s trust. A fourth-quarter collapse to a Wisconsin program that hadn’t beaten a ranked team on the road since Oct. 30, 2021, will not help matters.
Dylan Stewart‘s meltdown: A moment captured by TV cameras during South Carolina’s 49-18 loss at Alabama should be concerning to Gamecocks fans. Stewart, their star defensive end, threw an obvious punch at Alabama tight end Josh Ford in the fourth quarter right in front of the referee that somehow didn’t lead to his ejection. And earlier in the game, after a roughing-the-passer penalty, Stewart appeared to ignore coach Shane Beamer as he was chewing him out coming to the sideline. Stewart has had an injury-plagued season, but South Carolina is a 2-2 team with a lot of problems on the field and potentially in the locker room.
Michigan‘s regression to the mean: If Wolverines fans are being honest, they stole one they didn’t deserve earlier this year against Western Michigan on a Hail Mary that the NCAA acknowledged never should have been allowed due to misapplied instant-replay protocols. When that kind of thing happens, karma is always waiting right around the corner. So perhaps the football gods are now even with Michigan after allowing an 11-play, 91-yard drive in just 106 seconds against Iowa, which won 20-19 on a touchdown pass as time expired.
ESPN’s microphone mystery: In anticipation of President Donald Trump attending Texas-Tennessee, Longhorns coach Steve Sarkisian said that it could be an issue for their headset communications if he were to go to the bathroom, for instance. Why? Because, according to Sarkisian, it happened last at last year’s national championship game, which Trump also attended. This led to a couple days’ worth of stories exploring the issue. So it was an odd coincidence that when sideline reporter Laura Rutledge attempted to explain to the ESPN audience that the Secret Service can impact radio frequencies due to “electromagnetic deconfliction,” the microphones being used by Chris Fowler and Kirk Herbstreit suddenly got overtaken with static. Though it likely had nothing to do with Trump, the timing couldn’t have been more weird.
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