Paul Finebaum: 2025 is a 'make or break' year for Lincoln Riley at USC

Lincoln Riley goes into the 2025 season at USC facing a make or break year, according to ESPN’s Paul Finebaum.

Riley is 26-14 in three seasons at USC, which isn’t bad on the surface. But considering the expectations, especially after he was hired away from Oklahoma, he hasn’t come close to what Trojan fans wanted.

So when Finebaum looks at it, Riley has this next fall to get it together.

“I don’t know why we were both thinking USC when you started asking that question,” Finebaum said on McElroy and Cubelic.  “I think it’s a make or break year for Lincoln Riley, and I think to his credit, winning the bowl game was really important. I mean, it’s amazing what a bowl game win will do, especially if you’re a school out there beating an SEC team to book-end your season. 

“What I’m concerned about is all the players that (have) bailed out of there, though, and I don’t know exactly what their roster looks like today, but I’ve seen a lot of players leaving compared to players coming in. But I think that’s self explanatory. The expectations for him are through the roof, and you can’t get away with a couple of bad years at ‘SC, even if you end on a high note.”

Following a solid debut season, Riley and USC have only gone backwards since. That included a second year with Caleb Williams, a Heisman winning QB, in Year 2.

In the end, with NIL and the transfer portal, roster building is very different. And for Riley, perhaps adjustments have to be made to have successful teams in 2025 and beyond.

“I think everybody’s having to determine where they place value on certain positions, on certain people, and that’s just the nature of it,” Riley said. “The NFL’s been doing it forever. You see the discussion on how much should you pay a starting quarterback in the NFL. How much is a running back worth? How much is a receiver worth? If a guy has this type of production, then what percentage of a salary cap does that entitle them do, or does that make sense for the program to be able to give to them? It’s very cut and dry. It’s very production-based. Everybody’s going to have their philosophies.

“But for us, that’s the mindset you’ve got to have. We’ve got a salary cap and we’ve got to look at production and we’ve got to look at positions, we’ve got to look at value to the team. All of those things. It’s been fun, kind of putting that together, really deciding what our philosophies are going to be on it.”