Lincoln Riley, USC and the million different things to do when a new coach comes to town

Publish date: 2024-05-13

Dennis Simmons had just pulled into the parking lot at Oklahoma’s Memorial Stadium to begin work on Sunday morning, Nov. 28, after Oklahoma lost to Oklahoma State 37-33, when he got a call from his boss, Lincoln Riley. The head coach informed his receivers coach of the past seven seasons that he was taking the USC job. “The decision of whether I was coming with him, that was instant,” said Simmons. “It was like — all right. I need to inform my family. So I just turned back around (to tell them).”

By 5 a.m. the following morning, Simmons, Riley, defensive coordinator Alex Grinch, head strength coach Bennie Wylie and director of football operations Clarke Stroud were on a private plane bound for Burbank, California. They checked into USC Hotel on campus around 7:30 a.m. PT, changed into USC-branded clothes and went to a conference room at USC’s athletics building, Heritage Hall, to start watching film on the Trojans’ recruits.

Simmons’ family had just bought a new home in Norman that had barely begun construction. Now, he was in a meeting room discussing how best to construct the Trojans’ 2022 roster.

“There was so much going on,” said Simmons, “you didn’t really have time to agonize or think about, Oh man, I’m moving.”

But weeks before the school even knew who its next coach would be, dozens of employees had begun preparations for what became Riley’s Nov. 29 arrival. And his hiring set into motion a frantic chain of events that would eventually alter every aspect of USC football, from the 30-plus new faces now occupying most of the offices at John McKay Center to the nearly 70 different players to have either left or entered the program to the new signage that now wraps around the Trojans’ practice field to even the password for the program’s Twitter account.

“There’s just a million different things you don’t think about that have to be learned and communicated,” said USC executive senior associate athletic director/chief of staff Brandon Sosna.

USC athletic director Mike Bohn fired long-embattled head coach Clay Helton on Sept. 13, just two weeks into the season. Amid relentless media and message board speculation as to who the next coach might be — James Franklin? Mel Tucker? Dave Aranda? — Bohn and Sosna went about narrowing their pool. They enlisted SportSourceAnalytics to crunch data on 30 or so potential candidates. They held conversations with agents. Once they narrowed their list to seven targets, former Washington AD Todd Turner’s firm Collegiate Sports Associates quietly vetted them.

“It was like, we’re not going to miss on all of them. We’re going get one of these seven,” said Sosna.

Parallel to that process, beginning on Nov. 2, Sosna convened two committees within the athletic department to begin preparations for everything after the hire. The Football Coach Rollout team, which included marketing, media relations, social media, ticket sales and other departments, focused on the external publicity push. The Football Coach Transition Team, involving compliance, human resources, operations and finance, dealt with the internal nitty gritty that comes with hiring a new coach.

Helton’s firing in mid-September allowed for time to set all this up ahead of the urgency of the December signing period. The start of the NCAA’s contact period in recruiting began on Nov. 28 to lead to the early signing period on Dec. 15. All parties needed to be ready to process new hires’ paperwork and administer their compliance tests as quickly as possible so they could begin to recruit.

“We’re about to hire a new coach,” said Sosna, “and they’re going to bring in 10 assistant coaches and four strength coaches and four graduate assistants and a bunch of analysts, operation staff and recruiting staff — and we have to be able to onboard them. It’s made more complicated by the fact that the most important thing for any new staff member is they need to be able to be hired and recruit (snaps fingers) like that.”

While few outside the USC athletics complex believe it, both USC and Riley insist their first conversation with each other was a post-midnight video call in the hours after Oklahoma State knocked off the Sooners, eliminating Oklahoma from the Big 12 championship game for the first time in Riley’s five-year tenure. He would accept the job the next morning.

“I remember thinking at one point before we went to bed that night, you’re going to sleep for about an hour or two, get up and make a decision that’s going to change a lot of people’s whole worlds,” said Riley. “Under that timeline, it was just kind of crazy being in it. That something that life-changing could happen that fast.”

His first recruits were Grinch, Simmons, Wylie and Stroud. “He simply said ‘USC,’ and I immediately knew what he meant,” said Grinch. “We’d never had a conversation about any other job, and in that moment, you could tell what he was getting at.”

Bohn, Sosna and USC director of player personnel Spencer Harris flew to Oklahoma City that Sunday night to escort those four plus Riley’s wife, Caitlin, and daughters Sloan and Stella to Southern California early the next morning.

Sosna brought some reading material with him. He and assistant AD for football Joseph Wood had compiled thick binders of information to get the new staff up to speed on the state of USC: scholarship breakdowns; detailed evaluations from the personnel team; weight-room measurables and academic reports for every player on the roster; pending NFL decisions; latest injury reports; committed recruits and where they stood in the admissions process; suggested top-priority targets; official visit schedules; and basic talking points about USC when pitching the program.

“We basically had a three-hour personnel meeting (on the plane),” said Sosna. “It was the fastest flight I’ve ever been on.”

Back in Southern California, Samantha Adams, Bohn’s deputy chief of staff, stopped by a vendor around 5:30 a.m. for an important errand: picking up the red carpet. She drove it to Burbank to give their new arrivals — mainly Riley’s daughters — their first taste of Hollywood as they walked off the plane and into the limo.

📍 Los Angeles@LincolnRiley #FightOn✌️ pic.twitter.com/MKxN1FmlAP

— USC Football (@USC_FB) November 29, 2021

The flight landed in Burbank at 6:54 a.m. on Monday. From there, Riley’s itinerary included those film sessions, HR onboarding, photo shoots, meeting with the team at 2:10 p.m., and greeting high-level donors some 20 minutes after that. At 3 p.m. came the moment everyone from Norman to Los Angeles (and everyone else who follows college football closely) had been waiting for: Riley’s first public words.

Katie Ryan, USC’s director of football communications, attended those Football Coach Rollout meetings and was tasked with planning a news conference and a media “car wash,” which included interviews with Scott Van Pelt on ESPN and Colin Cowherd and Joel Klatt for Fox Sports. All without knowing who the coach was or when they’d be announced.

“I had to develop a 72-hour media plan,” Ryan said. “That was a unique task in itself, not knowing who the person was going to be.”

Over the past few years, USC’s introductory news conferences had typically been in the team meeting room of the John McKay Center. This time it was held at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum from the swanky 1923 Club — a space overlooking the city skyline that’s reserved during games for Trojan Athletic Fund members.

“We wanted to do something different because obviously this was going to be a major announcement that was going to rock the college football landscape,” Ryan said. “No matter who the coach was going to be, it’s USC and we’re going to get that sort of national publicity. We’re starting a new era, and we want to give that a new feel.”

That meant spending that Sunday afternoon making sure the electricity at the 1923 Club was working, looping everyone at the Coliseum into the plans, coordinating with the development department to send invites to donors, reaching out to former players, getting media, and making sure they had the presidential podium in place.

School president Carol Folt officially took office in July 2019. She stepped into a university that had been ridden with scandal and controversy. The athletic department, which had been run by former football players with no administrative experience, contributed more than its share, with its involvement in the FBI’s probe into the college basketball recruiting world and the Varsity Blues admissions scandal.

Over the next two years, Helton continued to underwhelm and questions from USC’s fan base about the university’s commitment to football grew louder, as did the frustration directed and Folt and Bohn. Those doubts were washed away as she stood at the presidential podium and introduced Riley.

“I did have a couple of people who wrote me letters and said, ‘Boy, I’ve been giving you a lot of grief online. I want to say I’m sorry.’ I did get those and it was actually really fun to get those,” Folt said. “And I got really nice ones from other people who said they were really hoping but weren’t sure it was going to happen.”

The glitzy rollout of Riley’s hire achieved its intended effect of rocking the college football landscape.

“(Riley) was mentioned in almost 7 million tweets (that week),” said Bohn.

College GameDay once did a segment on Riley’s seemingly supernatural ability to recall every play of every game he coached at Oklahoma. But when it comes to those frantic first days on the job at USC” “I’ve got a pretty good memory, and some of the things from those (first) days are a little fuzzy,” Riley said.

“In the beginning, you’re balancing (hiring) staff, starting to connect with the current team, and then you’re balancing recruiting,” he added. “Because those three things have to happen yesterday. The timeline of those is non-negotiable, and it’s a short window, considering how close it was to signing day.”

The week Riley was introduced, USC, then 4-7, had another game remaining against Cal, which had been rescheduled from Nov. 13 due to a COVID-19 outbreak in Cal’s program. For that week, interim head coach Donte Williams and the rest of Helton’s lame-duck staff remained designated as on-field coaches, while Riley and the newbies were designated as recruiters only to stay within NCAA limits on both.

The extra game gave Riley, Grinch and Simmons the opportunity to attend practices that week and get an up-close evaluation of the players. Harris walked Riley from position group to position group during individual drills. “I tried to study the roster at night,” said Riley, “almost looking yearbook style, with the faces on there, to try to start to remember their names and faces.”

But it wouldn’t be long before many of those faces would be replaced by new ones.

Having inherited a 4-8 team that lost six games by two touchdowns or more, Riley set out to turn over the roster as drastically and quickly as possible. USC could add up to 38 new scholarship players before the 2022 season — the annual 25 initial counters, plus six mid-year spots left open the previous year, plus up to seven transfer replacements thanks to a one-time NCAA waiver passed last fall.

But to stay within the annual 85-man scholarship limit, USC would need more than 40 players from last year’s team to move on. Most of that attrition would come naturally: Six players exhausted their eligibility, nine turned pro (wide receiver Drake London and linebacker Drake Jackson chief among them) and 14 decided on their own to transfer, including quarterbacks Kedon Slovis and Jaxson Dart and tight end Michael Trigg.

But also: “We obviously forced some of the attrition here,” said Riley.

To that end, Riley got an unexpected assist from USC’s compliance department, which found a little-known NCAA bylaw — 15.5.1.7 — that essentially allows new coaches to “cut” players from the roster for a up to a year after their hire, so long as the school continues honoring the players’ scholarships if they opt not to transfer.

“Once I learned about the rule you can cut kids … I had a strong feeling there would be a significant turnover within the roster,” said an assistant from USC’s 2021 team.

Ten players with remaining eligibility were classified as “head-coach exceptions” that would receive aid but no longer count against the roster number. In total, more than two dozen players from the 2021 team have either entered the portal, left the team or medically retired, of which Wood said seven remain enrolled and on scholarship.

“They’re removed from our roster, but they still get services that are for all student athletes, from mental health, academics, medical support — all that stuff,” said Wood.

Riley announced just seven high-school signees in December, including five-star cornerback Domani Jackson. But by February, he’d added just one more high-school signee, four-star receiver C.J. Williams — and 13 transfers.

“The thing we didn’t want to do is reach on high school guys that we didn’t know or hadn’t recruited — especially knowing that we needed some immediate help on this roster,” said Riley. “The biggest thing with the college guys is they’ve already been in college. it’s just an easier eval.”

Especially when they’ve already played for you.

On Jan. 3, quarterback Caleb Williams entered the transfer portal. The college football world immediately assumed the former five-star recruit who supplanted Spencer Rattler as Oklahoma’s starter halfway through his freshman season would follow Riley. Williams says today that was never a given, especially since “there were days when I was frustrated with him” for bolting.

And due to NCAA tampering rules, Riley was not allowed to speak with any of his former players until they officially entered the portal. “One day you’re talking to (Williams) 10 times a day and with him all hours,” said Riley, “and then (the next) day you’re telling them that you’re taking another job. Then for the next month, you can’t text him, you can’t call him, you can’t send a message through a buddy. It’s strange.”

Williams, a Washington D.C. native, visited USC the weekend after entering the portal but kept Riley in suspense for nearly another three weeks. He spent time with UCLA’s coaches and considered Wisconsin, which hired a family friend, Baltimore Ravens assistant Bobby Engram, as offensive coordinator. He enrolled just before USC’s late-January deadline to be eligible for spring.

“Knowing the plays already, knowing the playbook, liking how (Riley) coaches obviously goes into it,” said Williams. But the quarterback said the main reason he made the move from Oklahoma was that so many familiar faces from his former program were already there.

As Riley set about a staff and roster makeover, USC’s facilities staff embarked on a mad-dash physical facelift. Over the winter break when players returned home, Wood oversaw various renovation projects within John McKay Center to signify the regime change. They included new office furniture, new paint on the walls, new graphics displayed in the locker room and a new-look players lounge.

“We definitely were trying to make a good first impression that when those guys came back, that it was the start of something new,” said Wood.

The backdrop for post-practice news conferences was changed from gold to cardinal and emphasized the program’s most notable accomplishments: 13 Pro Football Hall of Famers, 25 Rose Bowl victories, six Heisman Trophy winners and 11 national championships — the historical standard the program has slipped from that Riley has been tasked with restoring.

Riley acknowledges that there have been several schools and franchises that placed calls to him during the season to gauge his interest before. In his own words, “that’s not even a blip on the radar screen.”

“I’ve always pushed it off to the side, just like I did any of them that called this year,” Riley said. “Until the season’s over. I feel like I’ve always had an ability to push all that stuff out and stay focused on the present, and I have zero regrets about my ability to do it this year.”

Riley has grown accustomed to the fact his decisions — whether he decides to take a job or not — impact a lot of people.

“I will always carry that. I just can’t separate myself from it,” he said. “It doesn’t mean I’m not going to do what I believe is the right thing, and we did, but that doesn’t mean I’m immune to the natural human feelings and emotions that go on with it.”

Since Riley was hired, USC has made 34 new hires across the football program. Only eight employees from the previous regime remain. The coaching staff consists of four assistants who worked at Oklahoma last year: Grinch, Simmons, outside linebackers coach Roy Manning and inside linebackers coach Brian Odom. A fifth, defensive line coach Jamar Cain, joined the staff briefly but later took a coordinator title at LSU. Riley also brought Annie Hanson, Oklahoma’s director of recruiting strategy/administrative engagement.

“An assistant coach needs a head coach to be employed and so it makes for a fairly easy decision in that moment,” Grinch said.

Riley has spoken to the fact that while much of what he did in Norman worked, there were things he wanted to do differently at USC. In rounding out his on-field staff, he prioritized coaches who came from successful programs. Defensive line coach Shaun Nua had just won a Big Ten championship at Michigan, where he helped develop No. 2 overall pick Aidan Hutchinson. Running backs coach Kiel McDonald was fresh off a Rose Bowl run at Utah. Offensive line coach Josh Henson was at Texas A&M, which finished No. 4 in the country in his second season there.

“These are pass/fail-type job,” said Grinch. “They don’t ask you how many wins, it’s about championships. For instance, at Oklahoma this past year, we failed.”

Most of the coaches and their families have settled in. Riley generated headlines when he purchased a lavish, multi-million-dollar home in Los Angeles’ South Bay. Of course, USC fans are more concerned about the headlines he’s generated for their program.

The enthusiasm has been extremely apparent this offseason as the fan base has shown much more engagement than it did in the final days of the Helton era. Publisher Ryan Abraham said his fan site, USCFootball.com, has seen a 35 percent increase in subscriptions since Riley’s hire.

On March 22, all the changes that produced that fervor were on display as USC opened spring practice. Riley’s visor now sported the interlocking USC logo instead of Oklahoma’s. A coaching staff with nine new assistants instructed a team with 13 new transfers. Williams accidentally tried to enter the practice field through the wrong gate before being guided in the proper direction.

First practice and star #USC QB Caleb Williams misses the entrance

He’ll be okay 😅 pic.twitter.com/SjjCZqW5v8

— Chris Treviño (@ChrisNTrevino) March 22, 2022

It was a window into the new world of college football where a coach leaves one blue blood for another and rosters can be flipped on the fly.

“I keep saying it, but it’s true,” Riley said that day. “By the time we kick off this first game, this is going to be the most unique roster in the history of this school and one of the most unique rosters in the history of this sport because of the way the roster’s come together.”

After months of working and planning behind the scenes, USC’s new reality was finally here.

“When they’re all in their USC gear and they’re on the practice field and they’re there coaching,” Ryan said. “That’s when it was like, ‘Wow. This is all happening.’”

Editor’s note: All week, The Athletic is going inside the 2021-22 college football coaching carousel with a series of stories on one of the wildest cycles ever.

(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; Photos: Brian Rothmuller / Icon Sportswire via Getty)

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Lincoln Riley, USC and the million different things to do when a new coach comes to town