Lincoln Riley considers most difficult stretches of his coaching career

Lincoln Riley served as East Carolina‘s offensive coordinator for five seasons before taking the same position at Oklahoma in 2015. While many see that as a stepping stone in his career — Riley took away some valuable lessons from his tenure as a first-time offensive coordinator.

Throughout his time at ECU, Riley saw success and in 2013 even helped lead the Pirates to their first 10-win season since 1981. Still, they never got over the hump — an experience that has kept Riley patient toward USC‘s struggles down the stretch this season.

“I was probably the toughest year that I’ve had as a coach, year two at East Carolina,” Riley recalled during UCLA game week. “We’ve got off to, in some ways, similar to this. The program wasn’t in a tough place like this when we had taken over, but we’d had a decent first year. Came back the second year, had a bunch of injuries most things didn’t go our way, we didn’t play well on top and lost a couple of really close ones. I remember it was a really tough year to go through.

“I’d never been through anything like that and I was kind of down in the dumps. What came out of that, though, was I think it pushed me to be better and push the program to be better. We found some guys that were really tough, hard-minded kids and took off into becoming what he became over the next several years.”

To Riley, he chalked the growing pains up to having never been in a major coordinator position before — and especially because he had to adjust to the level of responsibility that comes with leading a program to that extent.

Now, despite the hardships that 2023 has brought with it, Lincoln Riley still lays claim to having been to multiple College Football Playoffs as a head coach, coached a Heisman Trophy winner and has put together one of the most potent offenses in the country this season. Having that experience and success has matured him and kept him “even-keeled,” as Riley puts it.

“I didn’t have probably as much perspective,” he continued. “… Because I know what the good is like, I know what the patent is. I know what we got to do to fix it. I know what it’s going to take and I know that we’re going to get it done. You’ve got to be able to take any situation that comes up — again, whether you win a close game, you make that play at the end or you don’t — there’s still a whole lot else that’s going to have to continue to improve to go where we want to go.

“I know it’s rough and we’re going to get there. It’s just kind of one man at a time right now, put the right foot in front of the left and just keep it keep moving. If you do that, you have the right people at the right place, then good things are going to happen — and that’s what’s gonna happen here.”

Despite the Trojans’ losing ways as of late, USC has a chance to finish its regular season on a high note against in-city rival UCLA. The Trojans are six-point favorites heading into the weekend, per Vegas Insider, and kickoff is scheduled for 3:30 p.m. ET live on ABC.