Lincoln Riley talks about progress building USC program

USC may have had a demoralizing loss to Notre Dame over the weekend, but Lincoln Riley is looking at the progress the Trojans have made over his tenure thus far.

Riley recognizes USC is far from a finish product. Speaking with the media as the Trojans look to get back on track, the head coach explained how he’s handling the narrative after losing to the Fighting Irish.

“We’re definitely building,” Riley started. “Look at November two years ago, and look how it feels now. Two years ago, everybody was dying for a win, any kind of win. Now, everybody’s not happy unless we win by 30. That means we’re doing some pretty good things. That’s how I want it to be. That’s how, when you’re a high-level, championship program, with those type of standards, that’s how it should feel.

“So I think we’ve made great progress. I mean, we’ve made remarkable progress in a short amount of time. Now, am I satisfied with it? Is it where we want to be as we look long-term at this thing? Of course not. I want it to be the best program in the country, and I believe we can. I believe we will. But I’m not naive enough to think that. There’s a climb. There’s a, you have to struggle. You have to go through some of this. You have to get calloused a little bit. That’s just the nature of it.”

Moreover, Riley also compared his time at USC to the nature of the Oklahoma Sooners when he took over their program, elaborating on how different each team was at the time he became their head man.

“When you take over one that was in the position this one was, a lot of those calluses and things aren’t there, and every year and every expectation is a little new,” added Riley. “When I worked at Oklahoma, you still had to get up and do it, but that was kind of engrained, because it had been done there for so long, and so consistently. When it hasn’t, you’ve got to go through something like that, and we’re putting ourselves in great position.

“We have made amazing progress, but we still have a lot of steps to take, so hopefully we can take some of those here in the back-half of the season.”

Lincoln Riley certainly has USC on their way back to glory, but it’s evident the Trojans aren’t at that top level yet, for one reason or another.