USC, Lincoln Riley lead college football’s Misery Index after latest loss

When college athletes started making money — and often more money than a lot of fans will make in their entire lives — there were concerns about how 18- and 19-year olds would handle the entitlement that often comes with being young and rich but immature and unaccountable. It’s a valid issue, even if you believe in American capitalism. Money solves a lot of problems, but it presents a few as well. 

What you never, hear, though, is whether the same psychology applies to young coaches who have been given too much, too fast. 

Lincoln Riley became a head coach at age 33, taking over one of college football’s Cadillac programs at Oklahoma. But if you’re a Southern California fan who has watched Riley lose eight of his last 13 games, pick silly fights with the media and alienate a lot of people in the Trojans’ orbit with his petulance and arrogance, you have to wonder whether this is a classic example of someone who ascended too quickly and reached his 40s worse for the experience. 

Is Riley a better coach today than he was in 2017 when he very nearly led Oklahoma to the College Football Playoff championship game? 

The numbers say he’s not. And the circumstantial evidence says he’s miscast as the face of a USC program that isn’t recruiting like a blueblood, isn’t playing like a Big Ten contender and isn’t offering the public relations pop that you need in the nation’s second-biggest market. 

If everyone involved had a mulligan from December of 2021 when Riley made the shocking decision to leave the Sooners for USC, it’s hard to envision justifying a salary believed to be around $10 million a year for the level of mediocre football he’s produced in 2 1/2 seasons. 

Right now, 33 games into his tenure, it just looks like an awkward fit. Instead of adapting to the laid-back LA lifestyle and making it work to his advantage, Riley looks tense and immature. He lashes out at reporters who ask legitimate questions. And he has an athletics director in Jennifer Cohen that didn’t hire him and, from accounts within the program, hasn’t figured out how to bond with him. 

Riley is the kind of personality who makes everyone works so hard figuring out how to please him that they’d just as soon run the other direction when they see him walking the hallways. That will fly at some places, but it’s a complete disaster in a culture like USC. And when you’re not winning, it’s practically untenable. 

Let’s put a fine point on it: Riley isn’t accomplished enough to carry himself like Urban Meyer.

He’s got to chill out a little bit.

USC fans can handle some lean years. Goodness knows, they’ve had more than a few over the last decade. Even now, with the Trojans sitting at 3-3 after a 33-30 overtime loss to Penn State, there’s a way to spin this positively. 

Though USC doesn’t have the record it envisioned, it has lost these games by a combined 13 points under some pretty unlucky circumstances and had a late lead every single time. They’re truly a handful of plays from being 6-0. 

Under the right circumstances and with the right public relations strategy, Riley could be a sympathetic figure for a semi-rebuilding, gutty underdog USC. But you don’t get the benefit of the doubt when the most interesting thing that happens every week is trying to figure out which reporter a $10 million per year coach is going to berate for their line of questioning. 

That’s why USC is No. 1 in the Misery Index, a weekly measurement of which fan bases are feeling the most angst. 

Four more in misery

Oklahoma: The Riley divorce hasn’t necessarily been great for the Sooners, either. They’re in Year 3 under Brent Venables, and they’ve basically got the opposite problem they had under their former coach. Venables has undeniably improved the defense, which was expected given his Hall of Fame-level credentials as a coordinator, but the offense is a complete mess. The Sooners try to play fast and use a lot of misdirection, but to what end when they have no passing game to speak of and Texas could just stack the box with impunity in a 34-3 romp over Oklahoma? Michael Hawkins, the Sooners’ freshman quarterback, isn’t ready for this level of competition yet and showed it against Texas as possession after possession ended in disaster. And that’s a tough pill for fans to swallow when Dillon Gabriel walked out the door after last season and transferred to Oregon, where he is quarterbacking a likely College Football Playoff team. 

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Ohio State: OK, so let’s admit that losing a road game at Oregon 32-31 isn’t going to change the Buckeyes’ destiny in any significant way. This is one of the great benefits of the 12-team playoff era, giving teams some margin for error to play tough games without feeling like their season is on the line every week. But there’s a psychological impact of this loss for Ohio State fans because of the way it happened, with coach Ryan Day making some pretty bad mistakes under pressure. Down by just that one point, the Buckeyes had a first down at Oregon’s 28-yard line with 28 seconds left and a timeout. It’s unfathomable that they wouldn’t even get a field goal attempt from that position. But an offensive pass interference penalty (Did Day really need to throw it downfield?), a clock management debacle (Day didn’t seem to realize that the clock runs by rule after offensive pass interference) and Howard keeping the ball and sliding on after the clock hit zero (they still had a timeout left) ended the game in unsatisfying fashion. Ohio State will have chances to redeem itself, but after losing three straight years to Michigan and not quite getting over the national championship hump, patience with Day’s big-game performances is wearing thin. 

Florida: There are a handful of coaching decisions Gators fans will nitpick from their 23-17 overtime loss to Tennessee, but let’s zero in on the last one. It came after Florida scored a touchdown with 29 seconds left, putting them in position to either tie the game or go for two and the potential victory in regulation. Billy Napier, who needs some pretty dramatic improvement in the second half of the season to keep his job, at first sent the offense onto the field. But after a shift at the line of scrimmage that confused Tennessee, the Vols called timeout as you would expect them to do in that situation. But instead of sticking with his conviction, Napier came out of the timeout and sent the kicking unit out to tie the game — a bad idea that got worse after the Gators completely stalled out in overtime. Why in the world did Napier change his mind? He told reporters that “we just felt like let’s play overtime” after Tennessee called time. Not exactly a profile in courage on Florida’s sideline. 

Central Florida: There are a couple statistics associated with Knights coach Gus Malzahn that deserve some scrutiny. In 46 games as UCF’s head coach, he has lost 12 times as a betting favorite. His offense has also failed to reach 20 points on 11 occasions. So the question is, does one of the great offensive coaches of the 2010s still have his edge in the 2020s? UCF is now 3-3, and you can’t blame Knights fans if they’re a little frustrated after a 19-13 loss at home to Cincinnati. This has become a three-game losing streak, and the offense has not done its part in those performances with a combined total of 47 points scored. The offensive issues prompted Malzahn to bench veteran quarterback KJ Jefferson Saturday and start freshman EJ Colson this week, but the Knights switched to Miami transfer Jacurri Brown in the second quarter after Colson struggled. It’s hard to predict how it will all shake out, but the elation of moving to the Big 12 has worn off at UCF. Hiring Malzahn rather than an up-and-comer was a big statement about the Knights’ ambitions, but so far they don’t seem like as good of a program as they were in the American Athletic when coaches like Scott Frost and Josh Heupel made their offense a lot more fun to watch. 

Miserable but not miserable enough

Alabama: Had the Crimson Tide lost to South Carolina one week after losing to Vanderbilt, we might have needed to start a conversation about whether it would be necessary to extract Kalen DeBoer from a situation he isn’t ready for. Instead we can hold off another couple weeks. But Alabama’s 27-25 win over the Gamecocks confirmed there are some big issues that don’t bode well for the Crimson Tide’s next stretch of games against Tennessee, Missouri and LSU. After gaining just 313 yards and needing four South Carolina turnovers to eke out a win — the Gamecocks had the ball past midfield with 43 seconds left but couldn’t capitalize — Alabama looks like a team that at least half the SEC could beat on a given day. It was always going to be tough to replace Nick Saban, but it wasn’t supposed to be this tough. 

Utah: Many of Utah’s big disappointments the last few years have been the result of quarterback Cam Rising suffering a list of injuries so voluminous it could rival a Cheesecake Factory menu. But Rising came back Friday, and it didn’t make a difference in a 27-19 loss at Arizona State. In fact, Utah scored just one touchdown on seven trips inside the Sun Devils’ 30-yard line and committed three turnovers. Rising is 25 years old, and at some point Utah is going to need to figure out how to score some points when he’s not the quarterback anymore — or even if he is.

Purdue: Let’s give coach Ryan Walters some credit. Though it didn’t work, he went for two in overtime with a chance to upset Illinois. That’s what you’re supposed to do as an underdog, especially given the current overtime rules where Purdue would have been forced to go for two anyway in a second overtime. Still, what a crazy gut punch of a 50-49 loss. After rallying from a 12-point deficit to take the lead with 46 seconds left — including an onside kick recovery — Purdue’s defense couldn’t seal the deal and gave up a tying field goal at the buzzer. Instead of a season-making win, the Boilermakers fell to 1-5. 

(This story has been updated to change a video.)