USC head coach Lincoln Riley on the Trojans' loss to Notre Dame and the team moving forward

USC head coach Lincoln Riley spoke to the media following the Trojans’ 48-20 defeat against the Notre Dame Fighting Irish in South Bend on Saturday night. Here’s a look at what Riley said about the performance and his team moving forward.

Riley on USC’s performance against Notre Dame:

“Incredibly disappointing night. Didn’t play good enough to win the game here on the road in a rivalry game against a good opponent. I mean that’s the simple matter. I mean, the obvious thing is, you lose the turnover battle five to nothing. And you give up a kickoff return for a touchdown, you have a penalty that takes a touchdown off the board, a number of negative plays. That’s that’s the name of the game right there. I think they had maybe 250, 260 yards of offense. Thought our defense played good enough to win the football game, thought we stepped up and did a lot of great things there. But we just put, we put our defenses in some terrible positions.

Riley on USC’s reaction afterward:

“Obviously, we’re really disappointed. It’s disappointed locker room. It’s disappointed, certainly not defeated, not demoralized. Know that we’ve obviously got a lot in front of us. But this game means a lot. We know it means a lot to our fan base. It means a lot to college football and certainly disappointed that we weren’t able to play nearly good enough football to win tonight.”

Riley on his team facing a 24-6 halftime deficit:

“Thought the team had great resolve at halftime, still very much believed at halftime that we were going to win the football game. Came out and got a couple of stops, got the one touchdown in and felt like all the way through up until the kickoff return for a touchdown that we were right there. We were starting to get some stops. We were starting to finally kind of move the ball a little bit offensively, get into a rhythm there. And then obviouslythe kickoff return for a touchdown was a backbreaker there at the end of the game.

Riley on his belief in this team:

“Still very much believe in this football team, 1,000%. The good that you see from this football team is good enough to beat anybody. But we obviously know we got to put it together, put it together quickly, to get our best and to get it from all three sides and be able to rise together. And we got a great opportunity to do it. Listen, I reminded the team and I remind everybody, we’re undefeated in this conference right now. We play in, right now, what I think is the best conference in college football, top to bottom. And every opportunity that we want is waiting for us including a big one seven days from now in Los Angeles that we’ll be excited to get back and prepare for. We’ll obviously watch the tape. We have a lot of corrections and a lot of things that we got to fix and get better at. But can’t wait to get back to the Coliseum to go to battle with this team, the guys in this locker room. They’re gonna get our best in terms of the staff I know we’re gonna get their best and we’re looking forward to bouncing back and playing very well here next week.”

Riley on this game magnifying any issues with this team:

“When you lose the turnover battles so drastically, it honestly don’t matter a whole lot else what you do when you lose the turnover battle five to nothing and to me, giving up a kickoff return for a touchdown is almost like having a sixth turnover. You negate a pretty stout defensive performance. You negate any of the positive plays on the other special teams, the few that we had offensively. And so we just kind of consistently played from behind all night. Obviously, I think the big thing offensively is the amount of negative plays, whether turnovers or getting behind the chains. That’s obviously showed up for us here tonight when we’re kind of consistently playing from behind. And you can’t do that against a good defense and a good football team. Our good plays are good enough. Our bad plays are really hurting us right now. And typically when you play really well, your good plays are still good enough but your bad plays don’t l kill you. We’ve got to take a big step there offensively. We’ve got to do a better job. We’ve got to get turnovers. We got to take care of the football. You’re not going to beat anybody good losing the turnover battle like that.”

Riley on his team not being able to put together four quarters of good football:

“It’s a good question. We played pretty well right there before the bye week. We’ve had some stretches of good play here in the last few weeks, but we haven’t been able to put it together. And those are obviously the things that we got to look back and fix. I think this team has a very strong resolve. And again, when I turn on the tape, and I watch some of the good things happen, you still get really, really excited. But we do, we got to put it together and we got to do it quickly.”

Riley on the schedule ahead for USC:

“This is the true second half of the season. This is going to be the back half of conference play coming up for us right now, with a lot of opportunities right there. The thing we can’t do right now is we got to let the disappointment of not playing very good tonight…We got to get past it. We got to get on. We can’t let tonight beat us twice. Because we really do have a pretty cool opportunity in front of us. It’s just like I told you guys last year when we got beat up in Utah there that last second that game. If we’ll hang in there and keep swinging…Sometimes when you haven’t played your best a few weeks in a row you can get that feeling of well, you’re a long, long, long ways away. And the reality is we’re not that far away, but we do have to push it over the top. We got to play cleaner. We got to coach better. We got to play better on all three sides.”

Riley on the offensive struggle against Notre Dame:

“Kind of everybody took their turns. We had a couple of bad calls by me. Caleb said he forced a couple that he didn’t typically force. We dropped a few balls and a couple errors from the receivers. Missed a few things up front. We missed a couple of runs that we thought we blocked up very well that we didn’t make the correct cut. We kind of just took our turns making mistakes and that’s what it looks like. And so a couple of times in pass-pro that we got beat in one-on-one situations that we have to win. And so I mean, listen, everybody takes ownership in it. And that’s that’s just part of it. There wasn’t one position group offensively that was good enough tonight.”

What on what it will take to get things corrected:

“Work. Work. There’s no magic pill. office, right? You go work. You address the areas that are not showing up on Saturdays. You look at any personnel changes that you might make. What are you doing schematically? What are you teaching fundamentally? Because again, these little things, one of them changes, two of them change, and all of a sudden the whole thing can flip. The whole thing can flip. It is such a game of momentum. And so we know what we got to do. Now, we just got to put the work in and go do it. And the most important thing for our locker room right now is going to be ignoring all the outside noise. And we’ve got to believe in one another, and what we’re capable of, and we got to stick together. I told the guys I’ve been, you know, and this has nothing to do with me. I’ve been part of teams now for a little while. And as a head coach, I’ve been a part of teams, we’ve had several of them we’ve had a loss throughout the year because it’s pretty damn tough to go undefeated in college football, right? In case anybody hadn’t noticed, it doesn’t happen very often. And throughout my career as a head coach, we’ve had one time that we took a loss somewhere in the year and we didn’t end up with a conference championship game. One time. And in that game, we were one play away from being in the conference championship there, too. So this group is more than capable. Now, we gotta go do it. We gotta go make the corrections. We gotta go fix the things that we got to fix. We got to coach and play better. But is it in our power? Is it something we’re capable of? I believe it to my core. And we’re gonna go fight our ass off.”