LOS ANGELES — In 2010, quarterback Shane Carden walked into East Carolina’s locker room for the first time with only a vague impression of his new offensive coordinator’s system.
Carden knew the guy was just 27 years old. He knew he came from Texas Tech, part of the Mike Leach coaching tree. He knew that Leach tree meant the Air Raid. That was as much at the time as most on a national basis could have expected to know about Lincoln Riley.
Then Carden bumped into Riley in the locker room, sat for a moment with the young offensive mind, and everything became crystal clear.
“Our goal here,” Riley told Carden, “is to run 100 plays a game.”
It was a quarterback’s dream. It also demanded the most challenging physical preparation Carden had ever experienced. East Carolina was used to a slower pro-style offense from the previous Skip Holtz regime, and the roster was ready to buy into Riley’s no-huddle ideas but didn’t fully understand what it took. In offseason conditioning, Carden said, they’d be required to sprint a lap around the field within 55 seconds, then rest for 40 seconds, then repeat. Six times.
A decade after growing into the 2014 AAC Offensive Player of the Year, Carden – now a Realtor and high school football coach in Idaho – sat to watch his old coordinator lead USC into December’s Holiday Bowl matchup with Louisville and felt the tugs of memory. The Trojans were down to 53 players on their roster, and NFL-bound quarterback Caleb Williams and key receivers were out of uniform and out of mind, and Riley cooked up a spread-out game plan that let longtime backup Miller Moss simply play free in a six-touchdown performance.
And Carden saw an old version of himself in Moss’ shoes, young ambition firing again in Riley’s scheme a football life later.
“It was a little bit less pre-formation movement, a little less motion, and a little more to say, ‘Let’s stretch the defense vertically, let’s get some good reads for our quarterback, and let’s let him just sling it,’” Carden said. “And I thought that was really cool. That reminded me a little more of some of the ECU days.”
An unprecedented test in the 40-year-old Riley’s meteoric coaching rise is here, with USC’s foray into a new conference that boasts a radically different brand of football than his program’s strengths across his first two years with the Trojans. And much has been made, both in national conversations and within USC’s own walls, about the philosophical need to build a more physical defense and bulk up for the Big Ten.
Those who have crossed historical paths with Riley’s scheme, though, see another side to that coin: How will Big Ten defenses, cushioned by years of lining up against slow and middling attacks, adjust themselves to one of the most explosive offensive minds in recent college football memory?
Caleb Williams, and all his off-platform Heisman Trophy brilliance, is gone to the land of “Hard Knocks” in Chicago. Moss, a fourth-year former backup whose brilliance lies in timing and precision, is who remains. And Riley’s offense will shift again with Moss, just as it did with Williams, just as it did with Baker Mayfield and Kyler Murray and Carden and the legion of quarterbacks who have been molded under his tutelage. But his principles and aggressiveness will remain the same in the Big Ten, former players and coaches feel.
And Riley has made it clear, too: USC will change on its own terms. His own terms.
“I don’t know, I feel like sometimes, it gets made out in the media that the Big Ten is, like, some wildly different deal,” Riley said in the spring, part of a response when asked about USC’s adjustments to a new conference.
“Like, it’s football, it’s still – so a couple of teams play with one more tight end,” he continued. “Like, big deal. I think for us, it’s more our evolution as a program.”
‘There couldn’t be, probably, more expectations for him’
The signs peek through, past the sheer of Southern politeness, when Riley is doubted. His lips tighten. His eyebrows bunch. When posed a prying question or a challenge, he will often deliberate with a prolonged um.
The signs peeked through in late July, not so subtly, sitting at a podium in front of a swarm of reporters in Indianapolis at the Big Ten Media Days. A reporter asked Riley about a couple of Big Ten coaches’ comments on West Coast teams joining the conference: They enjoyed the sun too much, the reporter referenced, or couldn’t play in the cold, or couldn’t defend the run.
“Um,” Riley replied, in a dismissive monotone. “I don’t know. I really don’t care. We’ll find out in the fall.”
The same conviction has been there, since he was a 20-something wunderkind of a student assistant at Texas Tech treasured by Leach. Under the legendary coach, Riley grew into the wide receivers coach at Tech within a handful of years, and in the winter before his final year working under Leach, Riley gave a 45-minute speech at a coaches’ convention around the importance of the “four-verticals” concept to Texas Tech’s scheme. He called it “Six,” because, simply, it was designed to net six points.
In the audience, then-East Carolina receivers coach Donnie Kirkpatrick was enraptured.
“Man, you wanted to listen to him, and you believed what he was saying,” Kirkpatrick gushed.
A year later, when Riley took over as East Carolina’s offensive coordinator, the first play they installed as a part of his grand design was “Six.”
OK, Kirkpatrick thought,at least I know one.
He came to know plenty more, including a havoc-wreaking “mesh concept” – loosely defined by underneath receivers darting for crossing routes – so effective that Riley once said at a coaching panel, “If we run mesh 100 times all year, there’s going to be probably two out of the 100 that it’s not open.” In his origins as an offensive coordinator, Riley reflected last week after a USC practice, East Carolina didn’t have the talent or personnel of rivals like North Carolina State or North Carolina. So he designed the Pirates around playing fast, and spreading defenses out, and attacking individual defenders.
If they faced press coverage, no matter if it was a third-and-short, Riley would call a deep shot to a one-on-one matchup. If they hit a big play, they would race back down to the line of scrimmage, never losing tempo. When they played Virginia Tech, one of the best defenses in the nation, Riley operated full throttle from the first play, Kirkpatrick said.
“He was so aggressive,” Kirkpatrick remembered. “He never had a negative thought. He was never worried about failure, or anything. It was always, ‘We are going to be attacking you.’”
There was failure, of course. East Carolina finished with losing records during Riley’s first two seasons before eventually rounding into one of the better offensive units in the nation, and the coach spoke of those days last winter with slightly-graying hair and a reflective tone. He rode the “emotional rollercoaster” then, Riley reflected, without the perspective of a true lifetime in football.
“There was plenty of pressure then – like, if he’s not successful, they better figure out a new guy,” Carden said.
There is plenty of pressure, too, as a 40-year-old at USC, in the third year of Riley’s often-self-described program “rebuild” that can no longer reasonably be dubbed a rebuild after a third year. After years of defensive criticism dating to his days at Oklahoma, he cleaned house come the winter, bringing in a highly touted new staff and repeatedly referencing a shift in physicality in his program. And his offensive style, unrelenting throughout his career, will be tested in the cold and the wet of the Big Ten.
“This is a big year for him,” Carden said. “I think he understands that. Obviously, the team understands that. There couldn’t be, probably, more expectations for him.”
“But I think he loves that.”
Evolving ideas
There is a dichotomy here, between system and larger-scale philosophy.
“I think he adapts to a situation,” Carden said, “the best I’ve ever seen.”
The entire college football world remembers Riley’s ascension and earth-shattering offenses at Oklahoma. Few remember, though, that Riley struggled at times in that first 2015 season, after head coach Bob Stoops brought him to Norman. In Riley’s fifth game as an offensive coordinator, Oklahoma lost to Texas, 24-17, and racked up all of 67 rushing yards, and Stoops continued to implore Riley: This wasn’t East Carolina. He had better linemen and better backs, and needed to trust in running the football.
And Riley’s eventual embrace of the ground game, opening up further play-action looks – as Oklahoma finished top five in the nation in yards per carry in 2018 and 2019 – pushed him ahead of all Leach’s Air Raid disciples, Stoops reflected.
“Listen, Lincoln’s smash-mouthing with us played,” Stoops said, when asked about USC’s ability to play in a smashmouth Big Ten. “When he has the right teams and he has the right line, backs, he can smashmouth as well as anybody.”
“But, he’s going to always be innovative and throwing the ball also,” Stoops said, “so I think he’ll give the Big Ten a lot of problems. Because a lot of what he’ll do, they haven’t had a lot of.”
For reference: USC’s 2023 mark in yards-per-play (7.4), during an 8-5 campaign, would outpace any season by any Big Ten program since Ohio State in 2021 (8.0).
The question within Stoops’ words, though: whether USC will have those right linemen and backs to carry a successful ground game in the Big Ten. Questions still surround the right side of USC’s offensive front, and the only back with truly proven experience on the Trojans’ roster, Mississippi State transfer Woody Marks, wasn’t a consistent bell-cow in the SEC. And USC, too, no longer has Williams to compensate through breakdowns for an inconsistent running game and a porous offensive line.
But Moss, now minted as Riley’s next starter at quarterback, offers a separate set of strengths.
Riley’s scheme, Morris cited, thrives on limiting negative plays while keeping tempo; Williams fumbled 16 times in 2023, and the head coach was vocal midseason about his quarterback’s need to improve on taking sacks. According to Pro Football Focus, too, Williams averaged 3.17 seconds to throw in 2023, the 11th-highest mark among all FBS quarterbacks with at least 120 dropbacks. By contrast, Moss averaged just 2.55 seconds to throw across his 66 dropbacks in 2023 – which would have ranked tied for 137th if high enough in volume.
“I think if you have a guy that processes information really fast at quarterback, always a benefit in this system,” said North Texas head coach Eric Morris, once a receiver under Riley at Texas Tech.
“I think naturally that’ll be a point of emphasis for them,” Morris continued later, “understanding this guy doesn’t have the ability to create like Caleb did, and know that, ‘Hey, we gotta make sure that we get the ball out on time.’”
There is consensus, too, among those who have worked with Moss and Williams, that Moss’ style could in some ways be a more seamless fit in Riley’s scheme.
“I think the involvement of that offense will be really cool to watch,” said quarterback trainer Justin Hoover, who coached Williams and Moss at the 2020 Elite 11. “Where, it’s not relying on what happens off-schedule and what happens after this happens. It’s more of, like, ‘We’re actually going to dictate what happens next.’”
The emphases, then, might change, as Riley and his visor lead USC into the Big Ten. The force of attack, though, will not.
“He’s never gonna let up,” Kirkpatrick said.
Earlier this summer, Kirkpatrick saw a longtime friend on Minnesota’s coaching staff at a wedding, he said. They struck up a conversation, Big Ten mainstay Minnesota set to host USC and Kirkpatrick’s old OC in October.
“He was talking about,” Kirkpatrick said, “they were pretty worried about playing Southern Cal.”
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