LOS ANGELES — Makai Lemon found a soft spot in Penn State’s zone defense, caught a short pass and took it 14 yards to get to the Nittany Lions’ 49-yard line with 1:48 remaining in the game.
At the time, USC needed about 15 to 20 more yards to feel confident about sending kicker Michael Lantz onto the field for a game-winning field goal attempt. The Trojans had at least three plays and three timeouts to get them.
USC ran three plays over the next minute and 42 seconds. It didn’t snap the ball for that third play until there were 14 seconds left on the clock. Once the play was run, Miller Moss threw an interception.
It was a stunning display of clock management and one piece of a disastrous final stretch where the Trojans faltered on offense, defense, special teams and on the sideline with regard to game management. The end result? A 33-30 overtime loss to fourth-ranked Penn State — USC’s third loss that has come in the game’s final seconds or final play.
Once again, Lincoln Riley and USC were in position to win a tough, hard-fought game. And once again, they didn’t get it done. The Trojans possess the ingredients to be a 6-0 team. Instead, they sit at 3-3 and have essentially been eliminated from the College Football Playoff conversation by mid-October.
“The reality is we’ve played the toughest schedule in the country the first six games. We’ve had a chance to win every single game and that’s hard to do,” Riley said after the loss. “To put yourself in position to win these games is freaking hard to do to begin with. So we’re doing a lot of good. I understand that that good’s not going to get seen by the outside right now because they’re going to focus on the record and the fact we’ve lost three games, and I understand. That’s part of it.
“We all knew this when we signed up for big boy football, so I get it. We’ve got to do a better job at the end of games. I have to do a better job. Our coaches, our players, because we’re doing too many good things to put us in situations where we have a lead and can win. We’ve got to get paid off for it. We’ve got to be able to finish and it all falls on my shoulders at the end. That’s part of why they call me head coach.”
TOUCHDOWN USC! Trojans grab the lead again in the 4th. pic.twitter.com/fXZS14iOzT
— CBS Sports (@CBSSports) October 12, 2024
USC is in the Big Ten — it expedited the end of the Pac-12 as we knew it to move there. It’s building a new football facility. It hired a component athletic director — something the university doesn’t have a strong track record of doing. It’s paying its assistant coaches better than it ever has. It’s paying its head coach more than it ever has. NIL still has to take some steps forward but it has improved dramatically over the past year.
The commitment to football is greater than it’s ever been. It’s a better setup for the coach than any of his predecessors. So the simple truth right now is that USC needs more from Riley.
Make no mistake, Riley did a great job in his first season taking over a 4-8 program and turning the Trojans into an 11-win team that was on the doorstep of a College Football Playoff appearance. That was a massive overachievement.
In Riley’s own words, he had “more good players” in 2023. But after a 6-0 start, USC lost five of its final six regular-season games. The Trojans went from playoff darkhorse and Pac-12 favorite to the most disappointing team in college football. There were clear holes in coaching, culture and personnel.
USC has seemingly improved from a culture perspective this season — though that will be tested over the second half of the season. The team doesn’t play clean football every week, but it plays hard every week. Even if it had some bad moments on Saturday, including allowing fourth-down conversions of 7 and 10 yards on Penn State’s tying drive late in the fourth quarter, it has improved about as much as could be reasonably expected. The team does good things.
But here, halfway through the regular season, the Trojans are 3-3. It’s not that this team can’t win close games. It beat LSU in a tough, down-to-the wire game to open the season. It’s just that these close losses and being a play or two away, which Riley often refers to, are becoming this team’s defining characteristic.
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USC is good, but not good enough when it matters most. Riley has made the Trojans better than when he took over. But still not good enough to reach the level he or the administration wants.
After his 11-1 start at USC, Riley is just 11-10 in the 21 games since.
“Everything that we do ultimately falls on my shoulders. I promise you,” Riley said after the game. “I don’t sweep any of the bad or anything that hasn’t gone our way under the rug. We’re going to go fight like we always do to improve, to continue to grow. I’ve got to continue to get better. I own that and that’s part of it. We all need to be better and that starts with me.”
After this game, Riley will be criticized most for his timeout usage — or lack thereof — in the final minutes. During his postgame news conference, Riley said he and the staff had a dialogue about the proper time to use their timeouts.
“We were talking about, all right, do we need to use timeouts and stop the clock here because all of a sudden it’s second-and-12,” Riley said, referring to the moment USC lost 2 yards on first-and-10 after Lemon’s reception. ”If you don’t get anything there, then it’s third-and-12 and you just potentially bought them a series, and we weren’t in field goal range yet so we went back and forth on do we use them and stop the clock or not.
“Honestly, I felt so good about how Mike was hitting the ball that we said, you know what, when we got to the third-and-6 there at the end, I was like if we convert this, we’ve still got timeouts and maybe go one more shot and then obviously kick the field goal. How well Mike was kicking it I think was the biggest reason I wanted to make sure it was the last possession.”
Moss, who played his worst game of the season, was forced to make something happen with 14 seconds and made a bad throw that sailed high and was intercepted to end the threat. The offense failed to generate anything in overtime — though there were some questionable no-calls on potential holding by Penn State’s secondary.
PICKED OFF!!#PennState safety Jaylen Reed (@JaylenReed20) snags the interception with just seconds remaining.
👉 https://t.co/ssGVmKU3SD pic.twitter.com/TrjRM8bhat
— Penn State Nittany Lions | Happy Valley Insider (@PennStateRivals) October 12, 2024
The defense gave up 24 points in the second half and Penn State had its way with that unit. Lantz missed a field goal in overtime. Each side, and Riley, contributed to the loss, and now everyone has to pick up the pieces.
It’s not impossible for Riley to turn things around. The question of whether he will is becoming more pressing, though.
The reasons for optimism don’t make a long list. The Trojans have a top-10 recruiting class right now, but it’s not elite where it needs to be: the line of scrimmage. USC surrendered only one sack against Penn State, but it clearly had to game-plan around its pass protection issues.
Its defense went another week without a sack, and even when it did apply pressure on Penn State quarterback Drew Allar, it wasn’t enough to deter him from completing some crucial throws.
The roster isn’t built to contend at the top end of the Big Ten, and it will lose its two best offensive linemen and a ton from the defense when this season ends.
Rosters can change dramatically in an offseason but USC would need a dramatic talent infusion to be considered a top-four team in the league next year. Not to mention there are road games at Notre Dame and Oregon next year, which are places where the Trojans have had an extremely hard time winning lately and teams that are more talented than them. There’s a road game at Nebraska, too, which will be tough.
That could be three losses right there and that’s enough to get you out of the Playoff. So the road ahead is daunting.
“One thing I’m not going to do and our team’s not going to do,” Riley said, “is I’m not going to let things we have to get better at, things that didn’t go our way, shield the great things that are happening in that locker room, on this defense, on this offense, on this program. I’m not going to let that happen personally because I’ve been in this long enough, man. Everybody’s going to hit their adversity. That’s part of it and you either stand up and fight or you bow down, and I’m not about to bow down.”
The past two years have delivered the most adversity Riley has faced in his head coaching career. At this point, USC needs him to respond by simply delivering more wins.
(Photo: Jayne Kamin / Oncea-Imagn Images)
