This past Saturday, Lincoln Riley confidently said he wouldn't be leaving the Oklahoma Sooners to take the LSU Tigers' head coaching job. The very next day, Riley decided to become the next head coach of the USC Trojans, bolting Oklahoma for Southern California.
Riley held his introductory USC press conference on Monday, and the way he tells it, this all came together really fast.
“It came together quickly. But to be honest, in this day and age, in college football, it kind of has to,” Riley said. According to him, USC reached out Sunday morning with real interest and they were able to jump on a Zoom call where they made their final pitch to Riley. Within a few hours, the move was made official.
“Everything intrigued me,” Riley said. “The location, the history of the program, the opportunities here to recruit, to build a national championship level roster. The opportunity for my family to live in a new place.”
This seems somewhat hard to believe, and there are indeed other details in this story that show USC going through a vigorous process before landing on Riley as the man for the job:
To hear Riley, Bohn and USC's chief of staff Brandon Sosna tell it, the process to hire Riley was a high-wire act that involved months of work, multiple consultants, over a dozen vetted candidates, roughly 400 pages of data and a 50-slide presentation that USC showed to key influencers as part of their search process.
It all culminated on Saturday night, as Sosna paced inside a suite at the USC-BYU game while the Oklahoma-Oklahoma State game was on one of the screens. As the result of the game went down to the wire, they knew that it could swing Riley's decision or at the very least delay it.
However this played out, it was a rather shocking move given Oklahoma's recent success and USC's struggles. Riley claimed the Sooners' pending move to the SEC didn't play a role in his decision, and he's excited to try to build the Trojans back up to being a national powerhouse like they were under Pete Carroll.
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