USC football coach Lincoln Riley invited a small group of reporters to campus Tuesday morning for a "state of the program" discussion, as he's had a week to digest what happened in the Cotton Bowl loss to Tulane and assess this first year more holistically.
The conversation ended up lasting two hours, with Riley seated at one of two adjoined circular tables with eight Trojans beat writers, first giving his thoughts and takeaways from Year 1 and then answering any and all questions that followed.
Naturally, a number of them centered on his decision to retain embattled defensive coordinator Alex Grinch, which he confirmed in saying he expected no staff changes, and which was already apparent when Grinch played a major role in a big recruiting weekend as USC hosted key transfer targets.
Despite the panic projected by the fan base after the 46-45 collapse against Tulane, in which the Trojans squandered a 15-point lead in the final 4:30 and looked utterly hapless defensively, Riley was as resolute as could be that he has the right guy in place to lead the defense moving forward.
"I just, I've been through it enough with that guy to know, don't bet against him," Riley said. "... I know what he's made of. I just do. I know what's getting ready to happen defensively."
Many USC fans can only see what already happened defensively, especially at the end of the season as the Trojans gave up 533 yards and 47 points in a lopsided Pac-12 championship loss to Utah and then 539 yards and 46 points in the bowl loss to Tulane -- a game in which the Green Wave averaged a whopping 10.4 yards per play (2.5 more than the Trojans' previous worst game of the season).
It was such a disastrous dud of a performance that, ultimately, it has since overshadowed for many the 11 wins and remarkable 7-win improvement in Riley's first season.
Whether Riley has been following Twitter commentary or not, he wanted to address that narrative head on.
"We said it a lot, but it can't get lost the historic turnaround that happened this season. It can't get lost," Riley said. "And not just the 11 wins and team success and individual success, but just across the entire program. Like, we could have won 7 or 8 games and if all the things internally still had happened you could recognize the progress internally by other measuring sticks."
Riley raised USC football back from the depths, the low of lows, a 4-8 nadir that required him to first start with a dramatic roster overhaul in which nearly a quarter of the team's scholarship players arrived fresh from the transfer portal.
The season was an overwhelming success and exceeded any realistic outside expectations, as the Trojans climbed all the way to No. 4 in the penultimate College Football Playoff rankings before losing to Utah in the Pac-12 title game with a hobbled Heisman QB in Caleb Williams.
And yet, read the message boards or scroll Twitter, and the fact that Riley has opted to retain Grinch -- whom he brought with him to USC after three seasons together at Oklahoma -- has incited a furor from the most vocal segments of the fan base.
In addition to the aforementioned final two deflating defensive performances, USC also gave up 562 yards in a 43-42 loss to Utah in the teams' earlier meeting in Salt Lake City, 543 yards in a 45-37 win at Arizona, and 513 yards in a 48-45 win at UCLA.
The Trojans finished 106th nationally in total defense, giving up 423.9 yards per game -- a whopping 15 yards worse than the 2021 defense, which had the previous worst total defense stats in program history. They ranked 94th in scoring defense, yielding 29.21 points per game -- the fourth-worst season average in the USC record books.
So there's no confusion as to the origin of the fans' ire toward Grinch, but there's also more to the equation, Riley said.
"You go hire a staff member, you're not going to go do that based on this one season that they had at this one place. You're not going to do that. You're going to look at the body of work," Riley said. "... I think from a staff standpoint, I fully believe we have the right people in that building. I'm very, very clear and extremely confident on that. Again, that is based on what I see behind the walls here, that's based on certainly projected things going forward and the changes that we can and need to make. I think it's based on our ability to continue to add to this roster and make it a championship-level roster."
