Lincoln Riley details hiring process of new defensive staff

Following the 2023 season, USC Trojans head coach Lincoln Riley knew he needed to make a change on the defensive side of the ball. That’s exactly what he did too, bringing in a brand new defensive staff.

Riley, while making an appearance on The Hard Count with J.D. PicKell, detailed the hiring process for that new defensive staff.

“First, things like that are never easy,” Lincoln Riley said. “But the flip side of that is it does give you an opportunity to step back and say, ‘Where do we want this to go?’ For us, the number one word when we were able to take a step back and even before we started looking at specific people, it was systematically where do we want to go? Philosophically, where do we want to go? And the big word that kept sticking out to me was development.”

That emphasis on development, according to Lincoln Riley, comes from changes in the sport as a whole. That led to bringing in D’Anton Lynn as defensive coordinator. Along with Lynn, Eric Henderson joined to be a co-defensive coordinator and linebackers coach. Matt Entz came on to be the linebackers coach and assistant head coach. Then, Doug Belk came on to coach the defensive backs.

“I just think it’s, in this day and age, with all that’s changed, I really feel like that can be one of our many advantages here. So, we really try to go after guys that we thought were just very elite at developing defenses, defensive players, individual position groups,” Riley said.

“And all of the guys that you see that we’ve hired, you mentioned Coach Lynn and Coach Henderson. Obviously, Matt Entz, Doug Belk, all of those guys had a phenomenal track record in being able to develop and, really, all the pieces started to come together and, as you can see, we shot for the stars.”

Interestingly, a lot of those new defensive assistants came from key roles to land at USC. Lynn was the defensive coordinator at UCLA while Henderson was an NFL assistant. Entz won multiple FCS national championships as the head coach at North Dakota State. Then, Belk was a defensive coordinator in his last role.

“I mean, we did not take anybody off the table, whether conventional wisdom would tell you, you have a shot maybe to hire this person or not hire. We didn’t worry about that and we said, ‘Look, this is USC. Everybody’s gonna have some type of interest in this place.’ Now, do you get everybody, do you not? We’re not gonna worry about that, but we’re just gonna go after who we feel like is the best and we’re really, really proud of how the staff has come together and now it’s time to go put results on the field.”