USC named Lincoln Riley its new football coach on Nov. 28, and nearly four full months later he tells Oklahoma, I will always love you, but not really.
Riley could have done this four minutes or 40 years after he left Norman for Los Angeles and it would be received the same way.
On April 20, The Player's Tribune published Riley's first-person letter explaining why he left Oklahoma for Los Angeles, titled, "Sometimes Life Throws You a Curveball."
It could have been just as easily titled, "Sometimes College Head Football Coaches Lie Through Their Gums."
The first-person letter reads like a nice, first draft of a chapter from a Nicholas Sparks novel — before the love interest dies in a mud slide.
Riley appears to be sincere and genuine about select parts of his exit. Anyone reading the article should believe he is grateful to Oklahoma, its fans, boosters, and Bob Stoops. Oklahoma made Lincoln Riley, and he knows it.
Also, no one should believe his departure magically just happened in a five-minute span, as he suggests.
What he won't say is the reason he was vulnerable leaving Oklahoma in the first place: The job that he was handed by Stoops in 2017 is no longer the job he occupied.
Once Oklahoma joined "hated" Texas to leave the Big 12 for the SEC, the Sooners' became just another second-place candidate in the SEC.
Whereas in the Big 12 the Sooners own the entire league, in the SEC they will look like Florida. Or Tennessee. Or Texas A&M. Arkansas. Take your pick of a school not named Alabama.
Riley would have stayed in Norman forever, but he was receptive to leaving for a reason.
In the SEC, Oklahoma will lose.
In the Big 12, Oklahoma never lost.
And he didn't have to say, "I was not looking." That's why you have an agent.
By all accounts, he had checked out well before the end of the 2021 season. The speculation that he would leave Norman to replace Ed Orgeron at LSU was not born from some anonymous account on an internet chat site.
By going to USC, and the Pac-12, Riley effectively goes to Oklahoma West.
An Oklahoma that is by Malibu beaches. And Hollywood.
An Oklahoma that should own recruiting in the entire state of California, and is the best candidate to go to the College Football Playoff every year from the the Pac-12.
His arrival in L.A. could be magic not just for USC, but for the state of college football in the western half of the United States, where the condition of the sport has never been worse.
Other than the money, and the beaches, his case for leaving Oklahoma is perfectly reasonable.
Even if Riley wrote every single Sooners' fan a check for $10,000, which he can now afford to do, most people in Sooners' nation would want to tear it up in his face.
What Riley did to them was the deepest form of rejection. Unless you are retiring, or going to the NFL, you don't leave Oklahoma football.
What Riley did was to tell Oklahoma, You're the best, and I don't want you.
No amount of explaining in a Player's Tribune article will ever change how he made every single University of Oklahoma fan feel when he exercised his right to leave.
Believe Lincoln Riley that is he forever grateful, and appreciative, for everything the University of Oklahoma gave him.
Just don't believe why he left.
