As the 2025 College Football season approaches, everyone will start to project how each team will fare next season. One of the hottest topics of the offseason is always which coaches will end up being fired next season. Among the coaches feeling the heat is USC Head Coach Lincoln Riley coming off of an underwhelming season.
When USC hired Lincoln Riley from Oklahoma, the expectation was that he'd replicate his success with the Trojans bringing the program back to glory. Instead, the results have gotten worse year over year and heading into this season, USC isn't viewed in the top tier of Big Ten teams.
When asked on ESPN's Get Up, Paul Finebaum named the Trojans highly paid Head Coach as the coach with the most pressure to win this season.
"Lincoln Riley, and you asked the question, why? Because he has simply underperformed. He had a pretty decent first year, but since then, it has been very rocky. And quite frankly, I think he would already be gone if it wasn’t for about an $80 million buyout. Even for Southern Cal that might be too much money."Paul Finebaum
Whether or not USC would fire Lincoln Riley is a tricky question for several different reasons which likely means he's here to stay barring a disaster season. Given that Riley has a massive buyout, schools may not be willing to fork over that much money in this new era where revenue sharing cuts into the bottom line.
The other question you would ask is about who would be the better coach to hire if Lincoln Riley was fired? The Trojans have proven they can shock anyone as they got Riley out of Norman but, paying a massive buyout may not allow the Trojans to make a splash hire once again.
Regardless, Lincoln Riley needs to start winning otherwise the pressure and the outside noise is only going to get louder. The move to the Big Ten has only made Lincoln Riley's job harder but, he's starting to show that he can recruit with the Blue Bloods in this NIL era which is a great sign going forward.