Gold: Charmin-soft Trojans take after their coach, and it’s well past time Lincoln Riley toughens up
By Jon Gold
Published:
In college football, the No. 1 commodity is not size nor speed. It is not playmaking ability nor poise in the pocket. It is not a rocket arm nor thick thighs, not sticky hands nor lightning cuts.
The most important trait is simple, no-nonsense toughness, intestinal fortitude, true grit. It is the ability to weather a storm and come out the better for it, even if it hurts. Even in a loss.
You can see it in teams. Hell, you can smell it. It’s all over their faces when things fall apart, and in their shoulders and their chins and in their eyes. And you can see it when teams don’t have it. Even worse, when their coaches don’t hold them to that standard.
This is not an indictment of Lincoln Riley as a person. I’m sure he’s a nice enough guy, and he probably treats his friends and family well. He certainly treats his players well.
Too well.
As a coach, Riley is Charmin soft. Ultra. Eight ply. No need to fold when the Trojans’ defense will do it for you.
Riley choosing to not have his players — any players — face the music after a 34-32 loss on Saturday night to Utah was a symptom that points to a larger disease. The coddling at USC at this point has become costly, the babying bothersome.
It is clear that the Trojans were not made for the moment. That much is obvious. No matter how flashy USC has looked for Riley’s first 22 games, the cracks have been evident from the beginning. (His 17-5 record, by the way, is exactly same as Clay Helton’s, also after a loss at Utah.) Riley’s offensive mastery and a certain Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback named Caleb Williams provided plenty of cover, but we’ve seen a bevy of the same issues today that date to early last season. Maybe to Riley’s very first season as head coach at Oklahoma.
The Trojans are emotionally fragile. They are brittle. They are petulant.
They take after their head coach.
And why exactly did we think things would be different?
Had Riley gone against character and fired Alex Grinch after a folly-filled 2022 season, maybe you could see some personal growth.
But Riley has been this way for years. Offense-oriented to the point of being offensive. A brilliant mind for quarterbacking and play architecture but a fragile ego and a paranoid psyche.
The way Riley treated the media in Norman was the stuff of legend. He could get away with it because, well … Norman, Oklahoma … but in the 2nd biggest media market in the country, his impetuous behavior gets a whole lot more eyeballs. Not having Williams, or any leader for that matter, own up to even a heartbreaking loss is just the latest example of Riley’s lack of understanding what really matters in building a culture of character.
Can you imagine for a moment Kyle Whittingham, who just dealt Riley a 3rd loss in 2 years, ever “protecting” his players this way?
No, of course not.
Because this isn’t protecting them at all. Shielding them from what would have likely been rather empathetic questioning from a Los Angeles media far from the likes of the grizzled Chicago media of the 80s and the New York of the 1990s — that’s not going to toughen them up.
This is not the same as Riley’s recent fit against Orange County Register beat reporter Luca Evans, who drew Riley’s ire for a handful of small, procedural shortcuts that were straight from an eager young beat writer’s playbook. If he saw what I did as a 25-year old beat writer covering UCLA for the L.A. Daily News, he would have put a tracking device around my ankle.
This is not petty wrist-slapping. Nor is this a full-throated defense of the media, because, too be fair, on the whole we’re pretty awful these days. Click, click, click, said the masters.
No, this is purely about a team displaying toughness through turmoil, and 2 straight losses into what threatens to become a lost season, this team sure ain’t tough.
“When you haven’t been in this position in a while, it takes time, and it’s gonna take some scars,” Riley said after the loss. “It’s gonna take some tough lessons to learn. These are lessons that we couldn’t learn last year, like it wasn’t like this. It didn’t feel like this. This is part of our progression, and it sucks, it kills you.”
Which should be terrifying for USC fans, because things certainly aren’t going to get easier from here.
After a brief reprieve Saturday at Cal, the Trojans play Washington, Oregon and UCLA to close our their regular season.
Do we really feel USC is ready to embrace a new identity with a month left in its season? No chance.
The Trojans are who they are.
Flawed. Fragile. Frustrated.
And made entirely in their head coach’s image.
Jon Gold has won multiple state and national awards covering college football. He is the Pac-12 columnist for Saturday Out West.
