USC AD Supports Lincoln Riley...For Now

It's no secret that the 2025 season is a pivotal one for USC Trojans head coach Lincoln Riley. 

Riley joined SC ahead of the 2022 season, along with eventual Heisman Trophy winner Caleb Williams, and seemed to immediately turn the program around. Williams led the Trojans to within a win of the College Football Playoff, with his injury early in the Pac-12 Championship Game costing SC a shot at a title.

Despite an absurd loss in the Cotton Bowl to Tulane, expectations were high entering 2023 that SC could once again be a legitimate contender to both win the Pac-12 and finally reach the playoff. Instead, SC went 7-5, thanks in large part to one of the worst defensive performances in the program's history.

Riley revamped the defensive coaching staff in 2024 and saw immediate results on that side of the ball, though a historic streak of close losses meant the results got even worse. Despite playing at the level of a top-20 team, efficiency wise, the Trojans finished 6-6. 

USC has long lagged behind other top programs in ancillary investments; assistant coaching pay, recruiting resources, and more recently, NIL funds. But new AD Jen Cohen has worked to fix those issues, and it's clear she views 2025 as somewhat of a make-or-break year as a result.

Lincoln Riley and the USC Trojans have hired a new general manager for the football program as they look to compete in the Big Ten. (Photo by Ronald Martinez/Getty Images)

USC Making Investments To Beef Up Program

This offseason, USC's hired a General Manager for the football program, poaching Chad Bowden from rival Notre Dame. They added former NFL coach Rob Ryan to the staff, and extended defensive coordinator D'Anton Lynn after Penn State made a run at him. And brought in Doug Belk, considered by some evaluators to be the best recruiter in the country, to coach the secondary.

NIL has been beefed up, helping land prized recruit Jakheem Stewart out of Louisiana. For Cohen, it's clear she wants those investments to pay off. Quickly. When speaking to the LA Times, Cohen said she has confidence Riley can make USC a contender right away.

"Lincoln has the experience, right?" Cohen said. "He’s built and led championship teams before.

"So my focus with him is just investing and giving him, and not just him, but his entire coaching staff, his support staff that he has around him, every resource possible to get to the next level."

"What I can say is that USC is a special place and that we’re aligned and we’re resourced in a way to compete in what is a very evolving and changing landscape," Cohen said.

"And that we as a department, him as a coach, me as an AD, us as a university, we have to keep adapting to that. I feel like we just have to go execute. We have to go execute.

"And I feel really confident in the resources that we’ve put into this program. We know we can do it here because it’s been done here before. I’m just ready for spring ball to start to see some of these new faces we have."

While not an ultimatum, it's obvious that expectations for 2025 are far beyond the 13-11 regular season record in 2023 and 2024. Thanks to a much easier schedule this year, it might not be hard for the Trojans to improve. They open the season with Missouri State and Georgia Southern, before a road matchup at Purdue, a team that went 0-9 in the Big Ten and 1-11 overall.

Michigan State, at Illinois, a home date with a rebuilding Michigan are a manageable first half. The second half features road games at Notre Dame, Nebraska and Oregon, with home games against UCLA, Northwestern and Iowa. With that schedule, 9-3 seems reachable, if not more. For Riley's future, it had better.