Life moves pretty fast, and so does college football, though neither makes much sense. Just three years ago, Bill Belichick was on his way to his first post–Tom Brady playoff appearance, and the USC Trojans made what seemed like the absolute best possible move at the time: hiring Lincoln Riley away from the Oklahoma Sooners. Now Belichick will coach the North Carolina Tar Heels and USC is a Big Ten school that owes $80 million to a reeling and miscast coach.
Last winter, NFL owners wouldn’t hire Belichick. This winter, many USC fans are wishing for what they once feared: an NFL owner hiring Riley.
The coaches’ trajectories reveal a lot about the changing game. The 72-year-old might be perfectly suited for the current iteration of college football, while the 41-year-old, weirdly, might be a relic.
There was a time when no intelligent athletic director would hire a famously reticent 72-year-old NFL lifer. The lifeblood of college coaching was recruiting, which meant sitting in living rooms and convincing parents that their child would be in caring hands for the next five years. Now it’s about convincing athletes to give you their next five minutes.
Nobody will prepare players for the NFL better than Belichick, and that’s a far more powerful recruiting pitch today than “I’ll mold your boy into a fine young man.” Why should players worry about Belichick’s age if they can transfer whenever they want, anyway? Belichick is a master at getting the most out of the bottom of his roster despite the inevitable NFL churn. He should find his collegiate Malcolm Butlers and Matthew Slaters, and if North Carolina spreads its NIL money intelligently, he will win.
Now look at Riley. USC offered him an enormous contract in November 2021 because at the time, that’s what athletic departments did: throw millions at a big-name coach, hand him the program and watch recruits line up to play for him. USC was the most historically successful program on the West Coast, and Southern California is rich in elite high school talent. At least, theoretically, Riley could tout his work with Heisman winners, show recruits what his offenses did at Oklahoma and quickly build a powerhouse.
The problem is that the USC job is not just vastly different from the one he did at Oklahoma. It is vastly different from the one he was hired to do at USC.
A year after USC hired Riley, the school announced it would join the Big Ten. This created a fundamental problem for Riley: Defenses that practice against the Air Raid are not prepared to play teams with power running games and All-American offensive linemen. The Trojans blew a lot of leads this fall, and that might be a statistical fluke, but it’s probably a sign of underlying issues. USC was an easy team to come back against.
Riley is a bright offensive mind, and he won big at Oklahoma. But he did it with a formula that is no longer available to him: inserting a future NFL starting quarterback into his lineup and scoring a million points against less talented teams, effectively negating his team’s defensive failures.
It worked at Oklahoma in the pre-NIL Big 12. There were good reasons to believe it would work at USC in the Pac-12 (and for one season, it did). But now Riley coaches in the much deeper and more physical Big Ten, and the Air Raid is not nearly enough to win that league, even if Riley had a star quarterback, which he does not.
Riley also does not have one of his biggest assets when he was hired: a hot name. This year’s USC recruiting class was ravaged by decommitments, though Riley recovered well enough to finish in the top 15 of most rankings. With so many transfers, recruiting rankings do not mean what they once did … but if Riley doesn’t have the juice to convince high school stars to come to USC, how can he convince the best transfers?
The best players on the transfer market fit a certain profile: They have succeeded at the college level, but they think they can make more NIL money and position themselves better for the NFL at another school. If you were one of those players, would you bet your future on Lincoln Riley or Bill Belichick?
USC has a soft early schedule next fall and does not play the Penn State Nittany Lions or Ohio State Buckeyes, so Riley could have a nice rebound year. There is a path to long-term success for him at USC, but it’s a path he has never taken. Belichick, meanwhile, will show up to work at UNC accustomed to getting the most out of a roster in constant flux. Twenty years ago, hiring 72-year-old Bill Belichick would have been a mistake. Two years from now, it might look awfully smart.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Bill Belichick May Be College Coaching’s Antithesis of Lincoln Riley.
