Lincoln Riley’s defensive reset

Plan A went horribly for the Trojans as they tried to quickly assemble a defensive unit to match their immediately potent offense. Plan B is a massive pivot...

This newsletter’s has a theory of the case for why USC’s defense under Lincoln Riley has been so bad to the point where they squandered two seasons from one of the best college quarterbacks the modern game has ever seen in Caleb Williams.

In many respects I think Riley was a victim of his own success.

I can sum up so much of what went wrong for the Riley-era Trojans in the following graph:

A few key points in the timeline here are as follows:

• In 2020 head coach Clay Helton hired Todd Orlando, who’d been fired from Texas.

• Clay Helton was fired during the 2021 season and Air Raid offensive coordinator Graham Harrell was not retained, leading him to leave.

• Lincoln Riley was poached from Oklahoma for the 2022 season and replaced Todd Orlando with his Sooner defensive coordinator Alex Grinch.

What I want you to note from the graph is the effects of some of these changes. The USC offense, which had been good not great, wobbled during the 2021 season when the head coach was fired and the offensive coordinator was basically told he wasn’t going to stick either. The defense totally collapsed in year two under Todd Orlando, which is a major reason why Clay Helton was fired (a 3-9 Stanford pummeled them 42-28. That was the shape of things when Riley took over.

The USC Trojan roster Riley inherited was solid but nothing special on offense and coming apart at the seams on defense. What happened next was somewhat impressive on Riley’s part, illustrated a possible truth I’ve suspected about the transfer portal, and lead to massive scrutiny for the Trojan program.