Pete Carroll, a great USC coach, made one of the biggest mistakes of his career when he called for a pass at the end of Super Bowl XLIX for the Seattle Seahawks against the New England Patriots. The pass call was bad not just because Marshawn Lynch didn’t get the ball, but also because the formation Seattle used told New England’s Malcolm Butler that the route was going to go inside. Butler jumped the route and made a history-changing interception.
Had Carroll self-scouted, the pass play would have gone to the outside, not inside. History might have been different.
From one USC coach to another, it seems Lincoln Riley needs to be better at self-scouting. So says Oklahoma insider Kegan Reneau on The Riley Files:
“With Lincoln, I do think there was a lack of self-awareness,” Reneau said. “Again, this is something that I think we are seeing play out a little bit over the last six, seven, eight months, just the continued media opportunities that he’s taken, the things that he has said about why he’s left Oklahoma. He’s done about six interviews now about why he’s left Oklahoma, and we still don’t know any answers from those interviews about why he left Oklahoma. Right?
“When you’ve had success and you’re gonna continue to trust that process and you don’t adjust it too much, and you don’t change all that much, eventually when things go wrong, things could go really, really wrong.
“It was a little bit of self destruction in 2021 for Oklahoma, but those are the things I did disagree with that he implemented at Oklahoma at the time. In this final year, it really felt like Lincoln Riley may lack some self-awareness. I think a lot of those things came to fruition and we saw in public, including after the Bedlam game (versus Oklahoma State in late November), before he took the job at USC the next day. So those are the things I didn’t necessarily understand, but maybe he can adjust and change at USC.”
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