Lincoln Riley Wants Out Of The Historic USC-Notre Dame Rivalry

USC is seeking to cancel its century long series with the Fighting Irish, a top 10 rivalry in the history of all of college football.

[Sign up for Inside Texas TODAY and get the BEST Longhorns scoop!]

While I never thought USC-Notre Dame had the white heat intensity of Michigan-Ohio State, Alabama-Auburn, Army-Navy or Texas-Oklahoma, it’s given us a number of classic games and it’s always been a fun battle of competing cultures.

Now, it looks to be over. USC wants no more part of it.

More specifically, Lincoln Riley wants no more part of it.

Many will blame the new realities of the college football playoff era – consider USC’s Big 10 road travel, a nine game conference schedule, the playoff committee’s lack of sophistication in assessing schedule strength – but that’s letting USC and Lincoln Riley off of the hook.

The truth is that Riley has a documented history of not enjoying competition very much when he doesn’t hold the best hand. With the charismatic Marcus Freeman leading a resurgent Fighting Irish, it’s pretty clear who currently holds the upper hand.

Riley can’t square with that reality.

Remember, Riley’s first coaching job was taking over a loaded OU post Bob Stoops. The offensive wunderkind went 55-10 over 5 years playing largely outclassed Big 12 competition (and a down Texas) employing some of the best QBs in college football history.

Riley has never taken the formative lumps that characterize most college head coaching careers.

It shows.

When the program became truly his a few years in, some of Riley’s more neglectful chickens came home to roost as overall program development waned. They still won, but when they did lose, Riley proved remarkably thin-skinned and defensive.

Remember, Riley famously wanted to cancel the entire 2020 college football season. Some attribute that to his remarkable epidemiological insights into the pandemic and how it affected healthy 20 year old men (not at all), but at the time I offered that he didn’t like his team all that much and that this was a useful and cynical pretext to buy him some space and time.

That team still ended up improbably winning a permissive Big 12 after an 0-2 conference start (that would have been 0-3 but for a 53-45 4OT win over Texas), but it offered a very interesting insight into a young successful coach who didn’t like the risk of losing very much.

Even when he ultimately won.

Riley was good at his trade, but he preferred to peddle that trade at an advantage.

Perhaps the most telling moment is when he left OKC for LA not long after he learned that Oklahoma was headed to the SEC.

Was he fleeing SEC competition for a PAC 12 that he saw as another Big 12 where he could recreate a clear program advantage rather than play peer competitors, or was he simply getting out of an Oklahoma program that he knew was poised for decline (that he helped cause) while the getting was good?

Maybe both.

When he left Oklahoma, he left the sickness (recruiting and development misses), while taking the cure (his playcalling, his QB).

At USC, Riley has been a more mundane 26-14 and after losing the Heisman Trophy winning QB that he brought from Norman (he has now coached three winners and a runner-up), the Trojans were 7-6 last year.

Last year, USC’s schedule wasn’t easy. Losing a close game to Penn State was explicable. Dropping contests to Maryland, Washington and Minnesota wasn’t. That’s not a strength of schedule issue. That’s a preparation issue. In Year 3 of his reign.

Before last year, Riley also tried to get out of the LSU season opener in Las Vegas. A game that USC actually won. Still, yet another data point.

Now, Riley wants out of the Notre Dame series. A historic game that Riley has lost two years running – both times being demonstrably out-coached. A game that reminds Trojan faithful of their decline since the dominant Pete Carroll run of the 2000s.

Rather than do something about it, Riley would rather not play it at all.

There is a detectable fact pattern here.

Don’t buy the cover that it’s prohibitive travel or that the 9 game Big 10 conference schedule precludes Riley from playing any competitive non-conference games. A non-conference slate that he will soon stuff with Nevada, Missouri State and Georgia Southern while facing a Big 10 that has some elite teams at the top but lower and middle tier teams that shouldn’t be particularly threatening to any historically great program that monopolizes SoCal and West Coast talent.

I am unsurprised by all of this. This has been Riley’s modus operandi for some time now.

Without Trojan alumni or AD intervention, a historic hundred year series is the casualty to one coach who has never much liked a fair fight.