Lincoln Riley pushes back against narrative he left Oklahoma to avoid SEC

Oklahoma and Texas are joining the SEC on Jay 1, 2025, and Lincoln Riley won’t be there to lead the Sooners into the toughest conference in college football. Some have criticized Riley’s move to USC, and the Trojans headman went as far as posting an article on the Players’ Tribune and recently defending his position in an interview with 247Sports’ College Football Daily Podcast with Brandon Marcello.

“Yeah, I mean, I wrote it several weeks back,” Riley said. “It was difficult to kind of express it all and I wanted to find the right kind of route to say some things that I wanted to say. I didn’t write it to get a reaction to try to change anybody’s mind. That was not my goal in it. My goal was — it happened so suddenly. One day, I’m the coach at the other spot. And then, all of a sudden, this happens and it goes so quick.

“And I just never really felt like I had the right time to say some of the things that I wanted to say. You sit there and all these other people want to determine the narrative about what happened or want to define it. Guess what? This is my life. And I felt like there were some things that I simply wanted to say. So it was a good — felt like the right route to do it and glad I was able to get it done and kind of say my piece and be able to move on.”

During his time in Norman, Riley posted a 55-10 record during his five seasons as head coach of the Sooners. He won his first four Big 12 championships and even appeared in two College Football Playoff semifinals in 2017-18 and 2019-20, respectively.

All these accolades occurred after he took over the Oklahoma program when he was 33 years old. He said everything was going right toward the end of his tenure, and the easier thing for him to do was to stay up in Norman and head the program’s introduction into the SEC in 2025. He noted that the Sooners will be just fine under Brent Venables and is excited to the Lincoln Riley era underway in Los Angeles.

“The chance to [coach] at [USC] combined with some of the opportunities for my family off the field — the life away from it, the chance to live in this place, educational opportunities — it was just, at the end of the day, it just really was the right place at the right time,” Riley said. “And if you’re afraid of a challenge, you don’t take the head-coaching job at OU when you’re 33 years old. You don’t come out to USC to do this. I mean, that’s — the people that know us and know us well know we embrace those things, just like we’re going to embrace it here.”