Lincoln Riley has never had a defense. That is the short version of his four seasons at USC, and it is the reason the most interesting hire in Los Angeles college football this year was a coach who last ran a program in 2021.
Gary Patterson is USC's defensive coordinator. Riley, who spent five years in the Big 12 game-planning against Patterson's TCU teams, was direct about why: "I've never coached against somebody that I thought was more unique and tougher to go against than Gary Patterson," he said, adding that Patterson "adapts and coaches and develops in such a unique way."
The numbers Riley is trying to fix
Riley's offenses have never been the problem. His Oklahoma teams went 55-10 and his USC teams have scored plenty. The defense is the reason his tenure in Los Angeles has produced one eleven-win season and then a slide.
Since Riley arrived in 2022, USC ranks 117th nationally in yards allowed per play, 103rd in yards allowed per game and 87th in points allowed. For a program that recruits at USC's level, in a conference that now includes Ohio State, Michigan, Oregon and Penn State, those are not numbers a coordinator change at the margins fixes. USC has cycled through defensive staff since the move to the Big Ten without moving them much.
What Patterson actually did at TCU
Patterson spent 22 seasons as TCU's head coach and finished 181-79, the winningest coach in the program's history, carrying the Horned Frogs from Conference USA through the Mountain West and into the Big 12. He did it on a fraction of the resources of the programs he beat, and he did it with defense: five TCU teams finished first nationally in total defense under him.
The vehicle was the 4-2-5, the scheme he is most associated with, built around five defensive backs and enough disguise to make an offense declare itself first. It was designed for exactly the problem the Big Ten now poses USC, which is defending spread passing offenses without surrendering the run.
In January, Patterson was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame in his first year on the ballot. The class will be formally inducted in December.
The caution
Two things are worth holding onto. Patterson's last season as a head coach was 2021, and college football has changed more in the four years since, through the transfer portal and player compensation, than in the decade before. Building a defense now is as much a roster-acquisition problem as a scheme problem.
And a coordinator inherits the players who are already there. Whatever Patterson's record, USC's defensive personnel in his first season are largely the personnel that produced the rankings above. The scheme will tell early; the results may take a recruiting cycle.
What the hire does say is that Riley has stopped treating the defense as something to be managed around. He went and got the person whose defenses he found hardest to solve.
