Fresh off his team's first scrimmage of fall camp on Sunday night, USC coach Lincoln Riley talked with reporters after practice Tuesday morning.
As the scrimmage was closed to media, his takeaways from it were the first topic of discussion. Riley also talked about wide receiver Jordan Addison, team chemistry, expectations and more.
Watch the full interview below or keep scrolling for our complete transcript of his comments.
What were your takeaways from first scrimmage
"We had a lot of situations. I would say the defensive highlights, we had two interceptions -- both outstanding plays. Eric Gentry and Prophet Brown both had great interceptions. That would be the highlights there. Offensively, there were some big plays. We had a lot of back and forth. We had about a three-day period where defensively really dominated practices. I think when we talked last we were kind of in the midst of that. Offense had a little bit of an upper hand in the scrimmage, made a few more big plays, but there was a lot on both sides.
"It's kind of the first opportunity to get to live tackling in the open field. We've done some short-yardage work, but that's a different animal. It's great because you're able to obviously evaluate the offensive players and how they react in the open field, how do guys run, come out of tackles. And then obviously defensively you get that same evaluation because a lot of this does become so much of a space game. So there are really big highlights of each. Offensively, guys came out of some tackles and made some big plays. We had some tremendous individual one-on-one tackles defensively -- a lot to coach from on both sides.
"It continues to be a very much overall back-and-forth camp, and in my history that's been as a head coach, we leave the field one group's going to be happy, one group's going to be pissed -- for me it's always you're happy and mad both at the same time. Which is how I should feel. I want to feel that internal pull, where it's like you feel that back and forth and both sides are having success and both sides are being challenged. And I think that's what's happening right now."