Lincoln Riley addresses how he handled ‘unprecedented’ USC move

Lincoln Riley stunned the college football world in November of 2021 when he left Oklahoma to coach at USC.

Riley appeared to be in a great spot at OU. However, he felt like going to USC was the right decision for him in a move that upset several people inside and outside the Sooners athletics department.

The 40-year-old Riley recently joined Graham Bensinger and discussed how he handled the “unprecedented” move. He said the fact that there is an early signing period and a transfer portal to worry about in today’s college football world made it difficult.

“The timelines now with recruiting, early signing period, transfer portal. You take the same situation 10 years earlier, No. 1, you don’t have to do it the day after the last game of the season, because there’s time. There’s not a sense of urgency on, ‘Oh, well, there’s a signing class,’ or ‘there’s this transfer portal,'” Lincoln Riley said.

“And then as far as with the players and players that come with you, it’s a difficult decision. I mean it’s like, you put yourself in the position of, ‘Do I want players to leave the place that I was at?’ Absolutely not. One of the things I told the players when I stood up there is ‘I think every one of you should stay here and do it.’ And we actually, behind the scenes – people probably wouldn’t believe it now – we helped keep a lot of players there that are still there.”

While several players stayed, one who didn’t is Caleb Williams. The star quarterback followed Riley to USC and ended up winning the Heisman trophy last season. Riley said working through Williams wanting to go with him to USC wasn’t easy.

“If you have a player that you recruited, knew their family, you’ve been there with, and he says, ‘Coach, I want to go with you.’ Do you say, ‘No, you were good enough to come with me to this place but now I won’t take you here?’ It’s not easy,” Riley said. “And on top of it, I think the weight of all the people that that decision affected – the players at OU, the players at USC, all of the staff members, whether they’re the ones that came out here with us or went to a different spot or stayed at OU, their families, their kids. You’re feeling just the weight of all of that.”

Riley feels that he ultimately made the right decision leaving Oklahoma for USC, but he also acknowledges that he made some mistakes along the way.

That includes firing back at people at Oklahoma, as well as the Sooners fan base, as he made the transition.

“Unless you’ve been in that position, I can’t even really describe what that feels like. The move was — in this day and age — a little bit unprecedented. So I didn’t have a great road map to go off of in terms of how do you do this. I felt some of the backlash, and I said some things through it that added to it. I responded. I shot back a few times, and I shouldn’t have. … I’m the coach. It’s my job. I’m not a fan. I could’ve done better. There’s no question about it. Just by staying away from some of the things I said or some of the topics I got into, because I was emotional and angry about some of the things that were happening,” Riley said.

“And not even as much the things they were saying about me but just some of the things that happened to the staff we had there and their families. I let it get to me. There were better ways to handle it than me firing back something in the media or in an interview. And that added to it. But I told my wife and the couple of people I confided in the night we made the decision, I told them, ‘It’s going to be bad.’ And a couple of people were like, ‘Well, it’ll be a few hours, a few days. It’ll blow by.’ I said, ‘No, I’ve lived in these shoes. It’s going to be bad bad.’”