Lincoln Riley, at USC football spring practice, recently addressed the idea that USC’s massive staff changes and philosophical adjustments were made specifically for the move to the Big Ten. See for yourself what he said and what he thinks about the motivation for his change of approach in the offseason:
“I know it’s a big story on the outside, I get it. I know we’re playing some different people and there’ll be a few different things schematically and all that, but I feel like sometimes it gets made out in the media that the Big Ten is some wildly different deal. It’s football. So a couple of teams play with one more tight end — big deal. I think for us it’s more our evolution as a program. I have not shied away from the day I took the job here: We came here to win national championships. period. If you’re going to win national championships, you have to be able to beat anybody and everybody. For us to do that as a program, we have needed to take steps in certain areas that I honestly feel we would be taking whether the the Pac-12 was still in existence and moving along as we know it, or if something like this happened and we ended up making a change as we obviously did,” Riley said.
He continued:
“We’re not overlooking the fact that we’re certainly playing new places and some new people. Of course you got to be ready. That’s competition, and finding ways to to beat your competition to give yourself a leg up is part of what we do every single day, so we’re not discounting it, but this is not like ‘Oh my God we’re going to the Big Ten, we got to scrap all the plans and start this.’ It’s not to that extent, I guess, if that makes sense, so I’m just trying to give you a real sense of our approach and what it’s like here day to day. We certainly have to be ready, but I do think 95% of the stuff we’re doing we would be doing anyways, and is just trying to climb to get to the place that we want to go.”
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