New RBs coach Anthony Jones Jr. having to settle in quickly with Trojans
Anthony Jones Jr. was in a position meeting with his running backs at TCU when he got the call from Lincoln Riley.
The Trojans had lost running backs coach Kiel McDonald to the NFL's Los Angeles Chargers and Riley had honed in on Jones to fill the position.
"It was unbelievable. To get a call from Coach Riley is like a dream come true. I was actually in meetings at TCU and I looked down at my phone and it was Lincoln Riley, and I looked at my players and I kind of had a look on my face. They were like, 'Coach, are you all right?' I said, 'Yeah, I'm fine.' And I kind of ended the meeting early a little bit and gave him a call back," Jones said. "It's been fun ever since."
McDonald didn't leave late February, after the usual cycle of college football coaching turnover, and USC announced Jones' hiring on March 4 -- just 15 days before the start of spring practice.
It wasn't ideal timing for anyone involved, but in the end Riley feels the Trojans ended up in a good place with Jones coming aboard.
"He checked every box for us, and he's been fantastic. It's not easy to get somewhere a couple days before you're out on the field starting spring ball, running position meetings, and he's just dove right in both with the players, with the staff. I think you would jump in our staff room right now and think he's been here with us for years," Riley said. "He just kind of has that -- he's got an extremely genuine personality that I think people gravitate toward. You just kind of feel it with this guy. Really magnetic and really genuine.
"So I've been super impressed with him, his knowledge of the position. I think he's going to also make a really positive impact for us on special teams as well. He's got some really good experience there. You can tell he's been at the front of the room before and it's easy to see why he's moved up so quickly."
Jones takes over a USC running back group in transition in its own right.
Star rusher MarShawn Lloyd and steady veteran Austin Jones are preparing for their shots at the NFL, while the Trojans brought in Mississippi State transfer Woody Marks to go with returning second-year backs Quinten Joyner and A'Marion Peterson and four-star freshman Bryan Jackson.
"It's a great mixture, right? We got an older guy in Woody Marks, you've got two younger guys, you've got a real young guy in Bryan Jackson, who is only 17 years old right now. Love the room," Jones said. "I like the chemistry in the room. Those guys compete, and the good thing about it is they're unselfish."
Jones knows what a successful college football running back looks like.
While coaching the RBs at Memphis from 2018-21, he helped develop Darrell Henderson, Tony Pollard, Anthony Gibson and Kenneth Gainwell in to NFL draft picks, and at TCU the last two seasons he coached two more future NFL RBs in Kendre Miller and Emari Demercado and current NFL hopeful Emani Bailey.
When he recruits a running back -- and Jones already landed his first commit at USC in high-upside three-star Riley Wormley, out of Texas -- Jones said he looks for three things.
"Just a smart, tough, fast kid. You can put them in any order you want to put them in, but smart, tough and fast. If they're fast, we like them; if they're really fast, we love them," he said.
Jones had to make a tough and fast decision after that call from Riley last month, and he's confident it was a smart one making the move to USC.
"Probably about two or three days," he said of how long it took between that call from Riley and him taking the job. "And it really didn't take me that long -- it was just the logistics of everything. What do you tell your family, what do you tell TCU, what's this stuff about LA, is there too much traffic in LA, taxes in LA? Because an NFL team actually reached out first and I actually turned that one down, but it was just wrapping my mind around LA. I had only been here one time before and that was for the national championship. ...
"When you get an opportunity to work with a guy like Lincoln Riley and this staff, you can't turn that opportunity down. To be at USC, it's a program I grew up watching from afar back in my hometown of Memphis, watching the Rose Bowl games and you've got all the greats that played. You sit down and think about it and when your wife looks over and says, 'Baby, let's do it, let's go step out on faith' ... that was my confirmation."
Jones is actually working for his second Riley now after coaching under Lincoln's younger brother Garrett Riley, when he was the offensive coordinator at TCU during the Horned Frogs' run to the national championship game in 2022.
"I had known about him, and honestly, I didn't talk to my brother until the process with Anthony was still a little bit ways down the road," Lincoln Riley said. "I wanted to do some of my own research and just kind of try to get my own opinion on him. I knew I would certainly listen and trust my brother's opinion on him, but I kind of waited a little bit. It was great to have somebody that's been in a system that's similar and certainly being able to talk to my brother about being in the room with him and going through the fire and what he's like."
Jones knew the question was coming Tuesday when he met with local media for the first time since his hiring -- how do the Riley brothers' offenses compare?
"You know what, it's some [overlap], but it's not as much as you think because the terminology is different a little bit," Jones said. "When I was with Garrett, we called something one thing, and we two-called it, so it could be left something and right something. Well, left something is the same [here] and right something is completely different, which screws my mind up mentally. I'm like, I thought y'all was brothers, man, keep the same system for me and make it easy on me. But it's been good. Football is football, right? And concepts are concepts. It's just really the terminology of it."
Jones said every time he's thought he was up to speed the last month, he'd realize there was another wrinkle or layer to master with the offense.
Much like a new freshman coming into his first spring practice ...
"I think it's tougher for me, I'm getting older now. I think those guys are resilient and a lot smarter than I am, but it's been good," he joked. "I've had the chance in my career to work with some of the greatest offensive minds in college football, right? You think of Mike Norvell, you think of Kenny Dillingham at Arizona State, you think of Sonny Dykes and Garrett Riley and Kevin Johns, who was the OC at Duke. I've been privileged to work with some of the greatest offensive minds. And just to come here and learn up under Lincoln, it's been fun. It's been a lot of long nights, but it's been extremely fun to learn this offense."