LOS ANGELES — For four nights that passed this past week, Lincoln Riley did not see his children.
When Saturday afternoon arrived, bringing with it a momentous inflection point in his three-year tenure at USC, Riley stood for a pregame interview broadcast to a slowly-filling Coliseum and issued a rallying cry. This, the head coach declared, is one of the games that you come to USC for. This, really, was another chance to plant his flag in USC’s lore, to diffuse the rising temperature around two tough losses in a 3-2 start with a statement against fourth-ranked Penn State.
For nights to come this next week, as Riley made clear postgame, he will go to sleep thinking about the loss that unfolded at the Coliseum on Saturday.
“They all hurt,” quarterback Miller Moss said Saturday, rubbing his brow at a postgame presser next to Riley.
“This one, especially, was excruciating.”
It was not the final score: 33-30, another hard-fought effort by a program that’s never quit. It was the how. It was another game where USC (3-3) could taste victory, could see it in the end zone dozens of yards away, and came up empty-handed and shell-shocked. It was the reversal of a dominant first half, taking a 20-6 lead on Penn State before being buried in a record-setting performance by tight end Tyler Warren. It was the evaporation of their hope at a College Football Playoff, left with nothing more than almosts and a handful of plays they wanted back and a 1-3 record in the Big Ten.
“We’ve got a really good locker room of both really great people and really great coaches,” Moss said postgame, “that’s going to continue to stay together and go a run this back half of the season.”
“That’s the number-four team in the country. So what does that make us?”
It’s a complex question, because USC looked like one of the best programs in the country for 30 minutes against Penn State, only to fall victim to the same inability to close ballgames that had doomed them in three of their last four performances. After a back-and-forth fourth quarter that saw the Nittany Lions convert two gutsy fourth downs on a tying drive, USC stared at the end zone on a late drive that continued into enemy territory, ball on the 49-yard-line with the game clock running at 1:50.
And with a full complement of timeouts at his disposal, weighing his defense against a Penn State offense that featured tight-end Warren torching USC’s coverages to the tune of 228 yards, Riley chose to burn clock.
After a two-yard loss on a rush by gutsy back Woody Marks, Riley didn’t take a timeout. After Moss hit Jay Fair for six yards, Riley didn’t take a timeout. The rationale — tick — was simple, as Riley evaluated his options. Don’t give Penn State — tick — the ball back. Trust kicker Michael Lantz — tick — a steady Georgia Southern transfer who’d already nailed two earlier 40-plus-yard field goals.
“How well Mike was kicking it, I think, was the biggest reason I wanted to make sure it was the last possession,” Riley explained postgame.
Suddenly, USC had just 14 seconds left and the ball at the 45-yard line. Moss sailed a slant over the outstretched arms of an open Duce Robinson.
Penn State picked it off.
Overtime dawned, and three USC offensive plays went nowhere before Lantz missed a field goal, and three Penn State plays ensued before Nittany Lions kicker Ryan Barker nailed a 36-yard field goal and blue Lions began roaring across USC’s home turf.
That was it. USC’s field-goal defensive unit stood for a flash, unmoving, after the ball sailed through the uprights. Wide receiver Ja’Kobi Lane, walking back to the tunnel, chucked his helmet onto the turf and tugged off his jersey.
Riley had called a beautiful first half, in truth. On USC’s second offensive drive, redshirt freshman tailback Quinten Joyner took a jet-sweep from the right side with sophomore Zachariah Branch careening from the opposite direction — only for Joyner to pump-fake an end-around and race for a rollicking 75-yard-touchdown.
They gashed a tremendous Penn State run-defense in the first half, racking up 148 yards on just 11 carries against a unit that came in averaging 2.5 yards per carry. Marks finished with 111 yards on 20 carries, and Joyner tallied two touchdowns in a resurgence after a costly fumble in the previous week’s loss to Minnesota. USC’s defense held strong, too, in the first half, with true-freshman Desman Stephens II making a key play on an interception.
But USC’s complementary ball stalled in the second half, and Penn State marched right back with the play of Warren. Too often left inexcusably wide-open in the second half, he finished with 17 catches in sheer dominance, breaking former Utah tight end Dalton Kincaid’s 2022 record for most catches in a single game by an opposing receiver against USC.
“We gave him a couple where we didn’t make him earn it,” Riley said of Warren postgame, “and that’s probably the thing that hurts the most.”
When challenged by media, after the loss, Riley took responsibility numerous times for USC’s inability to finish.
I’ve got to continue to get better.
Everything that we do ultimately falls on my shoulders.
We could all be better, and that starts with me.
“I promise you, I don’t sweep any of the bad or anything that hasn’t gone our way under the rug,” Riley said. “We’re gonna go fight like we always do, to improve, to continue to grow.”
How USC grows, after a 3-3 start, may determine the fate of Riley’s rebuild in Southern California.
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