Lincoln Riley didn't have much to say Saturday night after USC's 24-17 loss at Minnesota about the decision to overturn the Trojans' late goal-line stand and give Gophers the go-ahead touchdown after an official review.
But he sure did Tuesday.
Before taking any questions after practice, Riley addressed the feedback he got from the Big Ten about several officiating calls in the game -- that last one especially.
"Went through our normal review process. That's why I didn't want to comment on a few of the things I wasn't educated on postgame. I had discussion on a number of calls in the second half. Unfortunately for us, that's part of the game. There was a number of misses there at the end -- the pass interference that was called, the pass interference that wasn't called, the intentional grounding and then certainly the last play. There was a lot of talk with the conference about that, and basically just to sum it up so we can all move on, the explanation that we got on the last play was that they believed or they thought the runner had scored, and they felt like that was enough to overturn it," Riley said.
"I have not been given any explanation why we ignored the part of the rule that obviously states that to overturn something, all right, that it has to be absolutely completely clear cut. There can be obviously no doubt about what happens. That part was ignored, which is unfortunate for us. Now, we're moving past it. It's not the reason that we lost the game. We had plenty of other opportunities, and I'm not sitting here blaming the officials, saying well, they did a bad job, that's why we didn't win the game. That has nothing to do with it. It's part of football, it's part of road football, it's unfortunate, yes, but obviously a lot of things that we can do better, need to do better and expect to do better going forward. I wanted to address that, and that's that."
That wasn't it, though ...
Riley took a couple more questions on the matter and continued to reiterate his point that the call on the field -- which was that USC stopped Minnesota short of the goal line on fourth down from the 1 -- should not have been overturned without indisputable evidence, which the conference acknowledged didn't exist on the film.
"They told me they believed he had scored, but when you get those sneak plays like that nobody can see the ball. The first time you see the ball it's on the ground. So when it came out, which they admit nobody knows when it came out, that's the difficult part," Riley said. "It's one of those that I think you look back and say that if the call on the field would have been a touchdown, there's no way they're going to overturn it and I would have understood and I probably wouldn't even have called them, to be honest. It being called short, in my opinion, there's no way that that can be overturned. The rules are pretty clear, but we just chose not to look at that part of it. ...
"They agreed that it's not indisputable. They agree, which is unfortunate because that's part of the rules. But listen, I get it, it's a close play -- I get it. Did he score? Maybe he did, maybe he didn't, I don't know. That's the problem is nobody knows, and you're going to have to go back on what the officials call on the field. Again, it's an unfortunate break, but there's a lot of things that led to that. I'm not the person, I don't make excuses, I don't allow our players to make excuses. I haven't talked about it with our players. I know everybody wants to just get our opinion on it so we can all move on, and that's why I want to address it, but at the end of the day we had plenty of opportunities to close out that football game and not put it down to a fluke play like that."
