Just for you Archives, some national love from today's WSJ. As I've stated we'll likely lose a couple of games this year and we're not yet ready to compete with 'Bama, Ohio State or Georgia. But that will come. You (rightfully) gave me sh*t for years because by keeping Clay Helton we showed football wasn't important to us. That time has passed. I told you we would be back.
The Overnight Rebuild That Has USC Back in the Top 10
The Trojans hired Lincoln Riley away from Oklahoma, filled huge roster gaps with transfers and have quickly vaulted back into title contention.
When Lincoln Riley took the top job at Southern California last November, he knew he was saying yes to a rebuild. What he didn’t realize was how many parts would be required to restore the Trojans to the elite status they once knew.
Long one of the glitziest programs in college football, USC’s shine dulled considerably over the last decade. After Clay Helton was fired two games into the 2021 season, 54 players on the roster left via graduation, the NFL draft, the transfer portal or retiring from football.
USC hired Riley to immediately replicate the success he had at Oklahoma, where the Sooners won four consecutive Big 12 titles and thrice earned College Football Playoff berths—though they never managed to win a semifinal game. There was no way around it: if the Trojans were going to make it to college football’s biggest stage in year one of the Riley era, the formula was going to be a little unconventional.
“I saw there were a lot of players that really wanted to be a part of this thing getting back to being a successful program again,” Riley said in an interview. “Then we went out and tried to find people on the outside that could add to the talent of our roster and…recognize the opportunity of, ‘Man, how cool would it be to play at USC and try to get this program back to where it used to be in terms of national dominance?’”
Riley raided the transfer portal, adding 26 players alongside an incoming class of 14 freshmen. He leaned heavily on the returning USC players to establish expectations for the newcomers.
The experiment appears to be working so far. USC’s 6-0 start is the program’s best since 2006. The Trojans are ranked No. 7 in a top 10 that appears to be wide open. The offense, led by second-year quarterback Caleb Williams—who came with Riley from Oklahoma—is bursting with playmakers. An athletic defense leads the country in turnover margin, intercepting 12 passes and recovering three fumbles.
All of the ingredients for a dream season—which seemed to come year after year in the early aughts under coach Pete Carroll—are there. All that’s left to prove is whether this team, assembled from so many different places, can find under a common identity, Riley says.
Riley and his staff knew the learning curve would be steep, for both newcomers and returning players. Those who stuck around through the Helton years, like offensive lineman Andrew Vorhees, cycled through three head coaches and multiple position coaches and coordinators since 2017.
Switching coaches so often is jarring for players. “It’s kind of like going to a different country and driving on the left side of the road,” Vorhees said.
There were a lot of holes on the roster—and not a lot of ways to go about filling them, other than through the transfer portal.
“Anytime you bring anybody in, specifically as a transfer, you want to upgrade,” defensive coordinator and Riley’s longtime deputy Alex Grinch said. “In this first year, some of it was just strictly based on need. That’s not a good situation to be in.”
Many of the Trojans’ transfers were the stars of major programs elsewhere. Riley lured Williams—the quarterback he recruited to Oklahoma, who had won the starting job as a true freshman in 2021—as well as his top young wide receiver, Mario Williams, to join him out west. Then came the lead running backs from Stanford (Austin Jones) and Oregon (Travis Dye), a promising linebacker from Arizona State (Eric Gentry) and the nation’s top wide receiver from Pitt (Jordan Addison).
There were a lot of new faces in the locker room all at once, to say nothing of the new coaching staff that included just one holdover from Helton’s tenure, former interim head coach Donte Williams. Riley understood that the spring and summer would be nearly as crucial in determining his team’s fortunes as the Saturdays when they suited up in the fall.
“He really challenged the dudes that were already here to kind of bring them on board and just show them what it was like in terms of the culture that we were trying to build,” Vorhees said. “I think the dudes that were already here did a really good job, because you’ve seen a seamless transition and integration of these transfers from all over the country.”
A big reason the extreme roster makeover worked was because of how badly the returning football players wanted to win after a dismal 4-8 season in 2021. They got daily reminders of USC’s iconic past whenever they walked onto the outdoor practice field—the walls list the number of Rose Bowl victories (25), Heisman Trophy winners (six), conference championships (37) and national titles (11).
“All those new people and you don’t know how they’re going to react to being around each other and how they’re going to mesh together,” Riley said.
The integration has appeared seamless so far. A prime example came last month in Corvallis, Ore., when Williams was having an off game against Oregon State. He is the kind of quarterback who is at his best when improvising reads and scrambling—his game has shades of his Sooners forebear Kyler Murray—but his freestyling was not turning into first downs, let alone explosive plays that night. The Trojans defense was there to pick up the slack, picking off the Beavers four times to preserve a 17-14 win. Two interceptions were caught by USC veterans, the other two by 2022 transfers.
“In college you’ve got to win, you’ve got to win games in different ways,” Riley said. “This isn’t the NFL, where you can go lose five or six games and then make the playoffs. It doesn’t happen like that. You have to be perfect.”
Plenty more of those tough games will be on the horizon for USC, starting this Saturday when they head to Salt Lake City to take on No. 20 Utah. Later is a date in the Rose Bowl against crosstown rival No. 11 UCLA, where electric senior quarterback Dorian Thompson Robinson has the Bruins off to a hot 6-0 start.
The unlikely football renaissance in the City of Angels comes just after USC and UCLA announced they plan to leave for the Big Ten in 2024. It’s a bitter pill for the Pac-12: the two teams that have a shot at ending the conference’s five-year drought from the College Football Playoff already have one foot out the door.
Riley will have one more season after this to re-establish the Trojans as what he calls the “bell cow” of the Pac-12 before he has to vie for that status against Big Ten powers like Ohio State and Michigan.
“This program could be successful in any league, any time, anywhere,” Riley said. “It’s still really really really hard to do, but this program has the capability.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/usc-trojans-lincoln-riley-football-11665490639?mod=hp_listc_pos2
