Do front offices see USC’s Lincoln Riley as a future NFL coach?
You win some, you lose some. At USC, that’s the recipe for a terrible football season.
The 5-5 Trojans, who play UCLA at the Rose Bowl on Saturday night, have blown fourth-quarter leads in all five of their losses. It’s a dramatic departure from the promise of two years ago, when head coach Lincoln Riley went 11-3 in his debut season.
Meanwhile, the 4-6 Chicago Bears have dropped four in a row, averaging 11.5 points in that losing slide. There’s turnover at the top of roughly one-quarter of the 32 NFL teams in a given year, and Chicago’s Matt Eberflus is a leading candidate for replacement. By all indications, he needs to get on a winning streak to save his job, and the Bears have a brutal remaining schedule that includes two games each against Detroit and Minnesota, plus San Francisco, Seattle and Green Bay.
The Bears used last spring’s No. 1 overall draft pick on quarterback Caleb Williams and need to capitalize on that investment. It doesn’t take much to connect the dots between Williams and his old quarterback whisperer at USC.
“Who would you rather put with Caleb Williams than Lincoln Riley?” asked CBS college football analyst Rick Neuheisel, who has coached in both college and the NFL. “If the Bears make a move on Eberflus, why wouldn’t you want to put Caleb with a guy who made him that comfortable?”
It’s all hypothetical now. There’s no indication that Riley has plans — or even a desire — to leave USC. But there’s no avoiding it, his name will surface as vacancies pop open.
UCLA football coach DeShaun Foster isn’t afraid to provide some bulletin board material for USC ahead of Saturday’s crosstown rivalry game.
In order to gauge the NFL interest in Riley, and how it has been affected by his three seasons at USC, I reached out to two top-level team executives, one from each conference. I provided them anonymity, including their team and specific job title, so they could speak as candidly as possible. Each would work directly with a team owner when it came to hiring a head coach.
For simplicity reasons, the executives will be referred to here as simply NFC and AFC.
Both praised Riley’s offensive acumen, and referenced the recent success of Kliff Kingsbury, who was on the USC staff last season and now is offensive coordinator of the Washington Commanders, working with outstanding rookie quarterback Jayden Daniels.
“If you’re Chicago, I think you have to at least consider it,” NFC said of exploring Riley’s availability. “Behind the scenes you can definitely make a call and say, ‘Hey, would there be interest?’ You’ll do that with Lincoln, and you’ll probably do that with Kliff too. Because those are guys who are heavily invested in Caleb Williams and have a relationship with him.
“I look at [Riley] as more of an offensive guy. At Oklahoma, he did a pretty good job with the culture there. What I’m hearing is at SC it hasn’t quite taken hold yet. I don’t know if that’s because of the staff he has around him or what. I think he’s definitely capable, more than capable of being an NFL head coach. But every organization has a different identity. … If there’s seven openings this year, I don’t know that all seven teams are knocking on his door.”
“The defense was awful last year. That’s on the head coach. The coordinator is on you. You could pick whoever you want as a coordinator.”
— An AFC scout on Lincoln Riley and his defense in 2023
There are two conceivable NFL paths for Riley, as a head coach and offensive coordinator. If considering him as a potential head coach, teams would have to take USC’s defensive struggles into account.
“The biggest thing with the NFL if you’re evaluating him as a head coach is what type of team identity are you trying to bring?” AFC said. “His teams typically have a good offense and the defense hasn’t been as great. Why is that? At Oklahoma, they had some talented dudes but they were still giving up 40 points. What type of culture? What type of practices? Are you a tough football team? Are you finesse?
“They’re better on defense this year. They brought in a coordinator. Obviously, [Riley] has won everywhere he’s been. But these last couple of years, I don’t know that it’s helped him. Caleb wasn’t as good last year, and the team around him wasn’t as good either.
“The defense was awful last year. That’s on the head coach. The coordinator is on you. You could pick whoever you want as a coordinator. At SC, they’re going to pay. You’re going to have all the athletes, but yet you let it get to a point where they’re one of the worst defenses in the country? How does that happen?”
What’s more, AFC said that Riley’s friction with the media would at least be scrutinized by potential NFL suitors.
“If you have really thin skin, the NFL’s not a great job,” AFC said. “Lincoln was kicking media out of practice? Come on. What are we doing? Let’s keep the main thing the main thing. That would worry me about him. … At least he’s been through pressure, because it’s high pressure with SC in Los Angeles, but you go to Dallas, you go to a New York team? Good luck.”
All that said, there’s no indication Riley has any interest in leaving his current job.
“I know he really likes it at USC and he’s got a great setup there,” NFC said. “I’m sure he wants that to work. Really, it’s a top-five job in college football. They’re just kind of in a transition right now.
“But with all the money and picks teams are giving up for quarterbacks, trying to identify and develop one, Lincoln’s one of the guys who can do that. … NFL owners can see those [coaches] from afar. They talk to other owners, coaches, media people about it. Some owners talk about it all day, every day.”
The list of head coaches who have succeeded at both levels is strikingly short. The only three to win a national championship and Super Bowl are Jimmy Johnson, Barry Switzer and former Trojans coach Pete Carroll.
“[Hall of Fame quarterback] Terry Bradshaw asked me one time, ‘Can you compare coaching in college to coaching in professional ball?’” said Johnson, also a Hall of Famer and Fox NFL Sunday co-host who guided the Dallas Cowboys to two Super Bowl wins. “I said, ‘A lot of people would say there’s a world of difference. I would say there’s a galaxy of difference.’
“With college football the priority is recruiting. With professional football, the priority is coaching. If you’re in one of those top 15 schools in the country in collegiate football, I used to say my wife, Rhonda, could have won nine games with that talent I had at Miami. The difference in the talent between the top schools and the bottom schools is vast.”
Tod Leiweke was president of the Seattle Seahawks when he lured Carroll from USC to the Pacific Northwest, noting in a text that “he was a winner wherever he was,” and, “players said he was more than a coach, but a mentor.”
Lots of coaches who were spectacularly successful in college football have flopped in the NFL, among them Urban Meyer, Nick Saban, Steve Spurrier and Lou Holtz.
Carroll had been an NFL head coach and defensive coordinator before his legendary run at USC, so going back to the pros didn’t feel foreign.
“He knew what he was walking into due to his prior experience,” Leiweke wrote. “He had honed his skills and was totally ready. And he is just a hell of a coach.”
There is a significant difference between coaching in college and the NFL.
“I think it’s more appealing to be an NFL head coach right now,” NFC said. “With college, the advantage is you’re basically your own general manager. The athletic director is the closest thing to an owner. But you get to run the show the way you want to do it, especially these high-profile programs. They give you the keys.
In a season in which he has rushed 174 times for over 1,000 yards, USC’s Woody Marks does whatever he can to keep his body in peak form.
“The downside is, all of this NIL stuff,” referring to the rights of college athletes to control and profit from their name, image and likeness, “and all the chaos that’s going on within college football with recruiting and working 11-plus months out of the year.
“You have parents with this NIL, ‘Hey, you’re not playing my son, we’re going to transfer.’ You don’t have to deal with that in the NFL. You have contracts, you have agents. A guy can request a trade or whatever but you don’t have to deal with the chaos.
“Guys want to get back to just football. They don’t want to deal with all the little tedious stuff that doesn’t matter to what’s happening on the field.”
As dedicated as he is to football, Riley is not singularly obsessed. He has a broader perspective on life, too. In a story last year about turning 40, Riley told the Los Angeles Times that he has never been fixated on burnishing his personal legacy.
“I know right now, there are things I want to do,” Riley told The Times’ Ryan Kartje. “I don’t want to have regrets when I’m done, at the end of my life. I do think about that. I just don’t want to have regrets, especially with anything that has to do with my family. It’s hard not to consider the possibility of starting over in life.”
Said Neuheisel, whose résumé includes college head-coaching jobs at Colorado, Washington and UCLA, and offensive coordinator of the Baltimore Ravens: “I think Lincoln Riley is a brilliant tactician that would need a really good defensive coordinator in the NFL, and then I think he can be great. But just like anybody else, they all need a quarterback.
“So to me, this is why I think Kliff Kingsbury is going to stay right where he is, unless he gets a chance to go to Chicago and coach Caleb Williams. But I think they’re going to make it really good to stay there in Washington and be the coordinator for a high price and just coach your guy.”
Likewise, Neuheisel said, if Riley were to leave USC, he would be most coveted as an NFL offensive coordinator.
“The bottom line is, he’s a wonderful offensive mind,” Neuheisel said. “And the NFL’s in desperate search for offense.”
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