Lincoln Riley admits he has considered giving up play-calling

Lincoln Riley opened up on what he could do better for the USC football program and that could one day involve giving up play-calling.

Now, will Riley actually do that? That remains to be seen for the Trojans’ head coach. But after a step back to 7-5 this season, Riley won’t rule anything out to improve USC.

While he’s considered one of the best offensive gurus and quarterback whispers in college football today, sometimes change is needed.

“There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to do what’s right for the program,” Riley said, via The Athletic. “I would never take anything off the table. So that’s something I’ve thought about from time to time. That’s also a piece of the puzzle in terms of who you hire, the other staff members that you have, where the program is at at certain points.

“There’s nothing I would say, ‘Well, I’m just not going to do that because I don’t want to do that.’ Everything for me is like, ‘What’s going to make USC better?’ If I ever felt like that was, I’d do it in a heartbeat.”

Riley gave that answer when asked if he would step back and be more of the overseer of the program, where he’ll control USC’s football program but not be in the nitty gritty of game day play-calling.

Riley’s proven he can bring a team to new heights. But with national title expectations every year, it’s fair to wonder if Riley will ever reach that height.

Without winning that title with Caleb Williams at quarterback, Riley came under fire for his program decisions to this point. Maybe the future is different with the next great QB.

Joel Klatt dismisses notion Riley can’t coach

Joel Klatt told Colin Cowherd that Riley was essentially, loyal to fault and gave Grinch every opportunity to snap out of the skid.

“Remember Alex got on the plane coming from Oklahoma to USC,” Klatt said on The Herd. “And then Lincoln was taking major heat. You remember how toxic that was his exit from Oklahoma? So I think he remained loyal to him from that perspective. This take that Lincoln Riley is a terrible coach, it’s so patently absurd, it’s like dumb.” 

There’s a notion that Riley should’ve seen this coming and should’ve not brought Grinch along. It’s pretty hard to do that in Riley’s position, according to Klatt.

“You can tell me like well, who cares if he got on the plane, that’s a big deal,” Klatt said. “It didn’t help him stop anybody. But he got on the plane.”