With Carol Folt’s retirement, Lincoln Riley is the last man standing at USC

The athletic director, the chief of staff, a key board figure, and now the president. The people on stage with Lincoln Riley in 2021 will all be gone next year.

Three years ago, when Lincoln Riley made the stunning decision to leave Oklahoma for USC, he mentioned the Trojans’ strong administrative alignment as one of the biggest factors that motivated him to do so. Three years later, he might be starting to question that decision a little.

One of the biggest X-factors in USC’s wooing of Riley was chief of staff Brandon Sosna. However, Sosna left for a front office job in the NFL before Riley even coached his first game in Cardinal and Gold.

USC certainly does not hire Riley without athletic director Mike Bohn. Under Bohn’s leadership, USC’s athletic department went from being a scandal-driven laughingstock to one of the premier operations in the country. However, Bohn resigned after Riley’s first season amidst reports of inappropriate conduct.

One of the speakers at Riley’s introductory press conference was USC Board of Trustees President Rick Caruso. However, Caruso resigned just a few months later to pursue a campaign for Mayor of Los Angeles.

And of course, spearheading the entire operation was USC President Carol Folt. While Bohn and Sosna may have done most of the dirty work, ultimately it was Folt who had to sign off on Riley’s nine-figure contract. Just last week, Folt announced her plans to retire at the end of the academic year.

At Riley’s introductory press conference in November of 2021, the head coach posed for a photo with Folt, Bohn, Sosna, and Caruso. Now, Riley will be the only one of the five still at USC next year.

Is this the end of the world? Not at all. Ultimately, Riley’s job is to coach the football team. It is not as though he is spending multiple hours with the president and athletic director on a daily basis.

But given that Riley was promised strong administrative alignment when he signed on, the fact that the four biggest people responsible for hiring him will be gone less than four years later is not exactly a great sign.

It is too soon to know what this will mean for Riley’s long-term future, but if he does not feel he has the support of the new administration, he could potentially decide to jump ship for the NFL sooner rather than later.

After all, there is a very good chance Caleb Williams and the Chicago Bears will need a new head coach this offseason. Just saying . . .

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Discussing Carol Folt’s leadership of USC football requires nuance

Carol Folt has done a lot to support USC football, but the program isn’t yet where it needs to be. This is a difficult debate.

On our recent USC call-in show at The Voice of College Football, we had a debate with a caller at the 28-minute mark of the video, posted below. Our discussion revolved around USC President Carol Folt and her leadership of USC football. We discussed the various details and dimensions surrounding how much she is prioritizing the program and, in the caller’s opinion, is not being as supportive or effective as she should be for USC football.

One notion which figured centrally and prominently in this discussion was Folt’s belief that USC needs to win the right way. The caller felt that was a coded way of saying USC won’t try to be extra-aggressive in the arenas where Georgia, Alabama, Ohio State, and Oregon regularly succeed. The contrary point to that claim is that Carol Folt hired Mike Bohn and Brandon Sosna, who brought aboard Lincoln Riley. Folt helped broker the Big Ten move which will give USC a lot of new and needed revenue. She oversaw the ground breaking on a state of the art football-only facilities.  Now with the hiring of Athletic Director Jenifer Cohen and the hiring of a new and improved defensive coaching staff USC has positioned itself to make a run at the top of the Big Ten Conference.

Have Folt and USC made the changes to allow USC to compete at the highest levels of college football? That is to be determined. Has President Folt committed to helping USC reach the expected standard? Certainly to a point. Callers and critics might say it simply hasn’t been enough. Where we can all agree: Let’s give Folt some credit even while we note where USC is still falling short. Folt cares. Now we need to see if she and Cohen can improve on what they have established. There is certainly room for improvement, even while needed fixes have already been made and paid for.

Here’s our segment:

https://www.youtube.com/live/WIczn-l-zmw?si=jXiGrwo5Qb78sgq-&t=1681

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Why USC’s timeline for new AD hire might be longer than previously thought

USC, by bringing in some big hitters from the world of college sports administration, might not be in any hurry to hire an AD.

The news broke last week that USC hired a temporary administrator (not an interim athletic director) to handle the athletic department. This move was accompanied by the hire of a transition team comprised of major power players in college sports.

We wrote about these moves last week:

“In order to replace Bohn’s working knowledge of the Big Ten and the vision Bohn had for USC’s move to a new conference, Folt has brought aboard a transition team of consultants: former Cal and Penn State athletic director Sandy Barbour, former Duke chief financial officer Mitch Moser, and former Big 12 Commissioner Kevin Weiberg.

“These are all heavy hitters with ample high-level experience in college sports administration. You will note that the Barbour-Moser-Weiberg trio has connections to every Power Five conference other than the SEC: Barbour to the Pac-12 and Big Ten, Moser to the ACC, Weiberg to the Big 12.”

What does this mean for the timeline attached to the USC AD search? Consultant Tony Altimore explained midway through the most recent edition of Trojan Conquest Live, the USC YouTube show which airs Sundays at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific, at The Voice of College Football.

Spoiler alert: This search might take a little more time than previously expected, but let Tony offer the fuller explanation below.

The next episode of Trojan Conquest Live airs on Sunday, June 4, at 8 Eastern and 5 Pacific. The special guest on this Sunday’s show will be USC legend Anthony Munoz. He joins co-hosts Tim Prangley and Rick Anaya for a one-hour conversation you won’t want to miss!

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Trojans: Wired podcast reacts to Mike Bohn’s resignation, USC AD search

There is plenty to discuss about the #USC AD job. @IanHest produced the show.

The USC Trojans are looking for a new athletic director. Their athletic department needs a new leader. Their athletic program, with its various sports, is in very good shape. Those statements might seem like contradictions, and perhaps to an extent they are, but they’re true.

USC has to make a change it didn’t want to make, but which it has to make. The school acted appropriately when it heard about Bohn’s inappropriate behavior. School leaders, by all appearances and according to recent reporting by the Los Angeles Times and The Athletic, did not sit on information or sweep it under the rug. That’s very good. Yet, the reality that an athletic director left under less-than-great circumstances is not a positive for USC.

One might therefore think that Bohn’s resignation and the unwelcome publicity attached to that development will hurt USC’s brand. That doesn’t seem to be the case. The Trojans have improving programs in football, men’s and women’s basketball, and baseball (even though the baseball team was unfairly snubbed for the NCAA Tournament). The USC AD job is an attractive one, so let’s continue to dive into this exploration of the position.

Ian Hest is the co-host and producer of the show.

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The central lesson taught by Mike Bohn of USC and Kevin Warren at the Big Ten

Bohn and Warren participated in moving USC to the Big Ten. Neither man will be around for the actual start of this new era.

In many ways, the common thread between former USC athletic director Mike Bohn and former Big Ten Commissioner Kevin Warren is that they both started something but didn’t finish it.

Both men participated in hammering out the deal which sent USC and UCLA from the Pac-12 to the Big Ten Conference last year, but neither man will be around for the actual beginning of that new era in college sports, a new era for both USC and the Big Ten.

There’s a lesson here.

To be very clear, the ways in which Kevin Warren neglected his job with the Big Ten Conference aren’t nearly as severe or as troubling as what Mike Bohn is alleged to have done at USC. An increasing collection of reporting from multiple news outlets continues to add detail to a picture in which Mike Bohn treated a lot of people poorly within the USC and Cincinnati athletic departments. That’s extremely bad. Kevin Warren has not been reported to have done anything close to that.

However, Bohn and Warren can still be connected in that they were both very sloppy on the job and did not earn the full respect of the people they worked for. Warren, as Pete Thamel of ESPN has reported in recent days, did not finalize television contracts and did not communicate specific details to member athletic departments, which has caused a mad scramble throughout the conference’s schools. Budgetary projections have to be revised. Allocations of resources have to be re-examined. Kevin Warren no longer works for the Big Ten, but he has made life more difficult for a lot of people who work at Big Ten schools.

What we have here with Mike Bohn and Kevin Warren — even though the severity of their actions exists on different levels — is a clear-enough reality in which both men knew they had registered fundamental achievements. Bohn hired Lincoln Riley, which he and everyone else in college sports knew was a game-changer for USC football and USC athletics. The move to the Big Ten was similar. Kevin Warren knew that landing USC as a new Big Ten member, and then arranging the framework (though not finalizing all the details) for massively lucrative TV deals, would print money for Big Ten schools.

The ways in which Bohn and Warren neglected their respective jobs were different. Again, Bohn behaved very poorly, whereas Warren did not — they’re in two very different moral universes in that regard. However, in one specific way, the two men are fundamentally the same: They surely thought or realized that they were making a lot of money for themselves and for their respective institutions. They knew they had increased the value of the places they worked for.

They neglected various other aspects of their jobs: Bohn not treating people well and not showing up for meetings, Warren not communicating to Big Ten athletic departments and not finalizing TV contracts. They both got sloppy. They both coasted to a degree. They both are somewhere else now. Bohn is disgraced. Warren, though not disgraced, is now working with the Chicago Bears and doesn’t have to deal with the Big Ten anymore, leaving others to clean up his mess.

There’s a very clear lesson here: Just because someone makes a lot of money for himself and/or others, that doesn’t mean one can or should coast on the job and get sloppy. It’s not a reason to neglect parts of one’s job description. Yes, the checks are going to cash. USC will get paid for joining the Big Ten. Kevin Warren and Big Ten schools will get paid for these TV deals Warren set in motion (but which current commissioner Tony Petitti has to finalize).

Yes, Bohn made money for USC and Warren made money for the Big Ten. We can acknowledge that. It doesn’t mean what either man did afterward was okay or acceptable.

Making money doesn’t mean moral, ethical, or professional failures are somehow made acceptable. That’s the lesson taught by Mike Bohn and (to a lesser but still real degree) Kevin Warren.

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Mike Bohn’s very complicated tenure at USC creates many contradictions

The complexity of Mike Bohn, simply stated: His people skills were great with some (Lincoln Riley) but awful with others at USC.

In the wake of Mike Bohn’s resignation — and more reporting on just how poorly he behaved behind the scenes at both USC and Cincinnati — it is true that Bohn did embarrass the University of Southern California. That is a plain reality which can’t and shouldn’t be ignored.

One might therefore respond by saying that Bohn was a failure at USC and that the USC brand has been damaged even more by Bohn’s actions. Such a reaction is logical and reasonable.

On the other hand, Mike Bohn hired Lincoln Riley, Lindsay Gottlieb, and Andy Stankiewicz. He moved USC to the Big Ten (with help from Brandon Sosna). One might therefore respond by saying Mike Bohn was a successful athletic director at USC. Such a reaction is logical and reasonable.

The purpose of this short article is to make a point clear: How we talk about and evaluate Mike Bohn’s tenure requires a simple but important distinction which should apply to lots of situations in other workplaces: People can fail at their jobs and still achieve very real goals which tangibly and materially improve situations. What makes Mike Bohn’s story even more complicated is that he was able to raise runds at USC and Cincinnati and hire some amazing coaches — Lincoln Riley at USC and Luke Fickell at Cincinnati, plus Gottlieb and Stankiewicz in other sports at USC — which points to great people skills. Yet, when working with athletic department colleagues, Bohn’s people skills were nonexistent and/or awful. His people skills were very selectively applied. He was and is that complicated as an athletic director.

How do we talk about someone such as Mike Bohn? The right balance is this:

Bohn was not a success. He was not a good athletic director or leader. He failed at so many aspects of an athletic director’s job … but he succeeded at the one aspect of the job so many people pay attention to: hiring great coaches.

Bohn damaged the morale of a workplace. He very directly hurt female work colleagues with his behavior toward them. No one who does those things is successful in a larger, truer, or more meaningful sense. Yet, Bohn’s tenure and some of its key decisions can be tied to really good (improved) results on the playing fields and courts. It’s not as though on-field performance didn’t improve; it did.

In the end, Mike Bohn did embarrass USC. He hurt the school’s reputation. He hurt other people. He was rightly pushed out. The school, by all appearances, realized this instead of sweeping it under the rug, and that’s a credit to Carol Folt.

Yet, the value of the USC athletic director job is greater than ever before, with football, basketball (men and women), baseball, and other sports rising to the top of collegiate athletics. This is a prized position in part because of what Mike Bohn did. We can’t exactly say USC is in a worse position than it was before Bohn arrived. Bohn definitely improved the athletic department in ways Pat Haden and Lynn Swann never did. No one can debate that point strictly in relationship to football, women’s basketball, and baseball performance. It’s not a defense of Bohn, merely a plain observation about the status of sports programs at the school over time.

USC’s reputation was damaged, but its position has been improved. That’s a complicated pair of realities, coexisting together.

How do we talk about Mike Bohn? It’s complicated.

Bohn, as a person and as a professional, cannot be regarded as a success. He shouldn’t be described as a successful person, someone who did his job well.

Mike Bohn did a few specific parts of his job (hiring coaches, also fundraising) well, but he neglected most parts of an athletic director’s job description. We could simply say that Brandon Sosna and other tireless workers in the USC athletic department during Bohn’s tenure deserve most of the credit for what happened these past few years. That’s probably the best way to look at all of this, minimizing Bohn’s presence and not allowing on-field success to unduly glorify Bohn for an anything-but-glorious tenure in which he did so much damage (damage which is coming to light in a steady stream of new reports).

Yet, if we’re being fully accurate, we can’t simply say Bohn had no role or influence in achieving any of those tangible successes. That wouldn’t be entirely true, and therefore his failures should not lead us to whitewash his achievements.

The right tone, the right balance, is struck this way: Don’t call Mike Bohn a success or a successful athletic director. He was fundamentally a failure. Yet, within that failure to lead an athletic department and represent a university with integrity, some really good things happened with the help of some great people who worked under him in very difficult conditions.

If a coach wins games but presides over ugly scandals, that coach wasn’t a success, but the larger failure doesn’t mean the coach wasn’t good at the actual on-field aspect of coaching. It’s kinda like that with Bohn. We shouldn’t amplify the skill at doing one or two things, but we shouldn’t pretend that skill never existed or never achieved anything, either.

We can leave it there without glorifying Bohn or pretending his accomplishments never existed. We can allow the darkness and the light to coexist.

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Two USC coaches who left during Mike Bohn’s tenure are revealed in new report

The LA Times noted multiple USC coaches left because they didn’t like working under Mike Bohn. The Athletic identified those coaches.

The Athletic produced a feature-length report on Mike Bohn’s unprofessional conduct as the athletic director at both USC and Cincinnati. The story builds on earlier reporting from Ryan Kartje of the Los Angeles Times. Kartje had noted in his reporting that multiple USC coaches left the school because of Bohn.

The Athletic’s story revealed who those two coaches were.

From the report:

“Two national-championship winning head coaches departed USC during Bohn’s tenure. One was Caryl Smith-Gilbert, who led the women’s track team to a national title the year before Bohn’s arrival and the men’s track program to several top-five finishes in the NCAA Championships. The other was women’s soccer coach Keidane McAlpine, who won the 2016 national title.

“In 2021, with Smith-Gilbert on the verge of leading women’s track to another national title, the University of Georgia made a courtesy call to Bohn to inform him Georgia wanted to hire her, according to a senior staffer. That source told The Athletic that Bohn ‘was non-responsive to (Georgia) for a couple of days.’ The Trojans won the title on June 12, and the next day Smith-Gilbert announced she was leaving to take the Georgia job.

“'(Bohn) allowed for a culture where championship coaches wanted to leave,’ said the source.”

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One quote sums up why USC didn’t sufficiently vet Mike Bohn when hiring him

This quote also shows the limitations and flaws of using a search firm when hiring an AD or coach. It will be studied by industry experts.

The resignation of Mike Bohn as USC’s athletic director was quickly followed by emerging reports of Bohn’s inappropriate and unprofessional behavior toward office and departmental colleagues at both USC and Cincinnati. While the USC part of the story was completely unacceptable and — on its own — sufficient reason for Bohn to be pushed out of his position, the eye-grabbing part of the story was that Bohn left behind a trail of wreckage at Cincinnati. This was new to a lot of people. USC obviously did not find these damning details when it went about the process of hiring Bohn from UC.

The question was asked the past week, and it was (is) a necessary one: Why did USC not get crucial information on Bohn? What happened in the vetting process which caused USC to fall short in unearthing instances of bad behavior?

Now we have our answer, courtesy of reporting from The Athletic, which unearthed a very revealing quote from a source. This one quote sums up why USC’s vetting process toward Bohn turned out to be woefully inadequate.

USC used the firm Turnkey Search when looking for its new athletic director in 2019, following the resignation of embattled AD Lynn Swann.

The Athletic reported (led by main reporter Justin Williams and helped by contributing reporting from Nicole Auerbach and Bruce Feldman):

“Those involved with the search received positive feedback from former-Cincinnati president Santa Ono, who hired Bohn in 2014, and other high-level administrators at the university, a source briefed on the process told The Athletic. Bohn passed a standard background check. But part of the reason an institution uses a search firm is for discretion, which meant there were limitations on how deep the vetting process could go without news of a candidacy leaking.”

“’You can’t call up every low-level employee in the athletic department,’ the person briefed on the search said.”

That’s it. That one quote, right there, explains why Bohn’s behavior didn’t come to light.

A full and complete search — a true investigation into Mike Bohn’s (or any other candidate’s) history — has to include talking to lower-level staffers. Getting feedback only from higher-ups, and not from the full athletic department staff, gave USC a deficient and incomplete picture of Mike Bohn.

The obvious point is that if any leader of a department can’t work and relate well with lower-tier employees, he or she is not much of a leader. While it’s true that an athletic director needs to make powerful and wealthy people (donors, boosters, chief administrators, football coaches) happy, he also runs a large department and supervises a lot of workers behind the scenes.

We can debate whether this fatal flaw belongs only to Turnkey or is a trait shared by other search firms, but this much is clear: Schools need to do full investigations of candidates and interview lower-level employees. If that wasn’t the industry standard in 2019, it has to be the industry standard in USC’s current AD search, and in future AD (and head coaching) searches around the country.

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Trojans Wire joins national YouTube show to discuss USC athletic director job

We talked to @MarkRogersTV at the @VoiceofCFB about the #USC athletic director search and a lot more.

The USC Trojans need a new athletic director. They still haven’t appointed an interim or acting athletic director (as of Wednesday morning). So, any exploration of the candidates, the big board, and the various categories of candidates is still relevant and timely for any USC fan.

We looked at some of the dimensions of the USC athletic director search, and we also analyzed both the downfall of Mike Bohn and his undeniable talent in hiring great sports coaches for USC athletics, in our newest live show with Mark Rogers at The Voice of College Football.

We also looked at the mess in the Big Ten with its television deal and how former commissioner Kevin Warren seemed to get out while the going was good. He did not leave behind an orderly and fully aligned situation, but as we note on the show, the checks are going to cash for the conference’s TV deals, and that’s why Warren will not be severely punished for his sloppy management.

Subscribe to, like, and share the USC channel at The Voice of College Football. Join as a member at the middle or top membership tiers and get exclusive bonus segments with Trojans Wire.

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USC seeks positive impact on and off the field with its next athletic director

Mike Bohn did well on the field by hiring great coaches, but his leadership in the office was poor. #USC needs a both-and replacement.

USC athletic director Mike Bohn resigned from his position on Friday, effective immediately. Bohn, over the last four years, helped lead a turnaround for the Trojans, hiring head football coach Lincoln Riley and negotiating the program’s move from the Pac-12 to Big Ten beginning July 1, 2024.

Bohn leaves the USC job after previously departing from the same role at Cincinnati to take the job out West. His ability to poach Riley, the highly regarded Oklahoma coach, allowed him to put his stamp on the athletic department. He also played a significant role in USC and rival UCLA leaving the Pac-12 for the Big Ten.

The 62-year-old resigned due to a large number of complaints about his leadership and management practices. Multiple people at USC and at his previous stop in Cincinnati — according to reporting from Ryan Kartje of the Los Angeles Times — cited inappropriate conduct in office settings by Bohn. These sources also noted that Bohn did not show up for meetings he was supposed to attend. By all appearances, Bohn did not display a professional level of behavior.

Yet, while Bohn deserved a pink slip, it’s also clear he hired great coaches, beginning with Riley and continuing with Lindsay Gottlieb in women’s basketball and Andy Stankiewicz in baseball.

Bohn’s successes aren’t canceled out by his failures. He deserved to be terminated, but he did objectively improve the condition of USC athletics.

There’s a discussion to be had about the impact an athletic director can have on a program.

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