$110 Million Head Coach Faces Major Pressure Ahead of Next College Football Season

Los Angeles — When USC lured Lincoln Riley away from Oklahoma in late 2021, the price tag was eye-popping: a contract that now carries one of the largest buyouts in college football history, reported by industry sources to hover around $110 million. Three seasons into his tenure, that investment is facing its stiffest scrutiny yet.

Riley’s Trojans closed 2025 at 9-4, an improvement over the program’s 7-6 stumble in 2024 but still short of the playoff standard USC set when it approved the blockbuster deal. With the new 12-team bracket set to debut in 2026, athletic department officials have quietly signaled that merely contending will not be enough.

“There’s pressure coming off a 9-4 finish to make something happen as a playoff entrant in 2026,” CBS Sports’ Brad Crawford wrote in his annual list of 25 coaches to watch entering the next carousel. Crawford placed Riley at No. 1, noting that real speculation about Riley’s future surfaced last November before a late surge and the nation’s top-ranked recruiting class, per the 247Sports Composite, temporarily cooled the conversation.

The upcoming schedule offers little room for error. USC will meet all three Big Ten programs that reached the 2025 playoff—Oregon, Ohio State and Indiana—during the regular season, hosting the Ducks and Buckeyes while traveling to Bloomington. A 10-2 record is widely viewed inside Heritage Hall as the minimum benchmark to secure a postseason berth.

Riley, 41, arrived in Los Angeles with a glittering résumé: three straight College Football Playoff appearances at Oklahoma, two Heisman Trophy quarterbacks in Baker Mayfield and Kyler Murray, and a reputation as one of the sport’s most inventive offensive architects. His first Trojan offense lived up to the billing, as Caleb Williams captured the 2022 Heisman and USC won 11 games. Yet back-to-back losses to Utah—once in the regular season and again in the Pac-12 title game—kept the Trojans out of the playoff, and a porous defense dragged the team to a 7-5 regular-season record in 2023. The collapse cost defensive coordinator Alex Grinch his job.

Since moving into the Big Ten, Riley’s record stands at 16-10, hardly the trajectory expected for a coach whose deal eclipses those of most NFL bosses. The 2026 cycle is forecast to be quieter than last year’s whirlwind that saw at least 15 Power Four programs change coaches between late September and early December, meaning seats considered lukewarm now could ignite quickly if on-field results lag.

For a coach once labeled the “biggest wildcard” of the previous carousel, the coming months will determine whether Riley can recapture the magic that made him the sport’s hottest commodity—or whether USC’s massive financial commitment becomes the sport’s most expensive reset.