Gary Patterson spent Saturday night watching USC from a place he usually doesn’t: the press box. From above the Coliseum, the defensive coordinator tried to move his pieces around, with Lincoln Riley later comparing the switch to “trying to just move the chess pieces to get everyone in the right position.”
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The strange part was that USC’s defense wasn’t completely falling apart. Washington had only 44 passing yards by halftime, while the Trojans had already piled up 50 penalty yards. USC was making stops, then finding new ways to give the Huskies life. Riley’s own diagnosis was blunt: “We just couldn’t get out of our own way.” Then Decker DeGraaf caught a pass and ran 42 yards down the sideline, slipping through two weak tackle attempts as Washington stretched its lead to 21-10.
This was never supposed to be the standard at USC. Lincoln Riley arrived with championship expectations, went 11-3 with Caleb Williams in Year 1, and made everyone believe the Trojans were finally relevant again. Cute. Five seasons later, USC still has no College Football Playoff appearance, no conference championship under Riley, and a growing collection of high-profile losses whenever the stakes actually rise. And then came the part Riley really could not ignore.
USC’s own student section started chanting “Fire Lincoln!” during a game the Trojans eventually won. That is not exactly a ringing endorsement of the rebuild.
The comeback did not start with USC suddenly taking over. It started with the Trojans finally stringing together one clean drive, a 13-play, 75-yard march that ended with Jayden Maiava finding Tanook Hines for a 10-yard touchdown. It cut Washington’s lead to 21-16, but the margin was still there. Then, less than two minutes later, Elijah Newby knocked the ball from Demond Williams Jr.’s hand, and 295-pound defensive tackle Jahkeem Stewart scooped it up and lumbered 48 yards for the go-ahead score.
Stewart later joked that he reached 22 mph on the run. Riley was less convinced. “If that was 22, they’re going to disband that GPS company,” he quipped. The joke aside, the play completed a 12-point swing in barely two minutes and gave USC a lead it had done very little to control.
That was the strange shape of the night. USC finished with 360 total yards to Washington’s 319 and held the ball for nearly 35 minutes, yet the Trojans still needed a fumble return to take the lead and a fourth-quarter field goal to make it a four-point game. Maiava finished 21-of-34 for 245 yards, one touchdown and one interception, while USC managed only two offensive touchdowns. For a team that spent September talking about how dangerous its offense could be, this was an unusually sputtering night.
And the penalties kept turning manageable moments into problems. USC had 50 penalty yards before halftime, more than Washington had passing yards. An illegal-formation call wiped out a deep touchdown to Kayden Dixon-Wyatt. Freshman defensive end Luke Wafle was flagged for a facemask on Williams after a sack, and an unsportsmanlike-conduct penalty killed USC’s first drive after halftime. By the end of the night, the Trojans had been flagged for 84 yards.
The timing made those mistakes harder to dismiss. This was Game 6, not the opening weekend, and Riley had already spent the week answering questions about whether his program was actually moving forward after the 41-27 loss to Oregon. Washington, meanwhile, arrived with a depleted running-back room and had managed just 40 rushing yards against Minnesota the previous week. The Huskies still ran for 116 against USC.
That made the final score look even stranger. Washington converted only one of 12 third downs, yet went 3-for-4 on fourth down. Its offense struggled for long stretches, but whenever USC had a chance to put the game away, another mistake or missed opportunity kept the door open. Even Riley acknowledged the contradiction afterward: “It felt like for a long period of the game we were really outplaying them,” he said. “But when you make some of those mistakes, you just kind of let them keep hanging around.”
There was one thing USC could point to as genuine progress. Patterson’s defense, despite the breakdowns, did not give up another point after Washington reached 21. The Trojans recorded five sacks, with Newby’s strip-sack producing the biggest play of the night, and held Washington scoreless for the final 28½ minutes. Riley called the pass rush “huge” and said the defensive line had to become the “tip of the spear” every week.
But even that improvement came with a warning attached. Washington had been held without a third-down conversion until its final possession, then suddenly converted a third-and-11 and two fourth downs to march from its own 5-yard line to the USC 12. Kameryn Crawford finally sacked Williams for a six-yard loss, forcing fourth-and-10 from the 18. Williams’ final throw toward the end zone was broken up by safety Prophet Brown with 39 seconds left. USC had survived — again.
The Oregon fallout made the timing even uglier. A week earlier, Desman Stephens II had been ejected for his late hit on Ducks quarterback Dante Moore, who suffered a concussion, and USC suspended Stephens for one game after his behavior following the play. Backup Dylan Raiola then threw for 289 yards and two touchdowns as Oregon beat USC 41-27. Stephens was absent against Washington, but the Trojans still spent much of the night looking like a team struggling to clean up the same kinds of mistakes.
That is what makes the “Fire Lincoln!” chants bigger than one bad quarter. Riley is now in Year 5 at USC. His first season produced an 11-3 record, a Heisman winner in Caleb Williams and a Pac-12 title-game appearance. Since then, the Trojans have gone 8-5, 7-6 and 9-4 before entering this season with the expectation that the program was finally ready to make the next jump. Instead, USC has yet to reach the College Football Playoff under Riley or win a conference championship.
And USC is no longer hiding behind a rebuilding excuse. The Trojans are 5-1 and still have a path through the Big Ten, but the next test arrives quickly: a road trip to Penn State on Oct. 10. The Nittany Lions are coming off a 34-13 loss at Northwestern, making it another game USC will be expected to win.
That is where Saturday’s escape could matter. The Washington win kept Riley’s season alive and moved USC to 2-1 in Big Ten play. It also gave him something harder to manufacture than a résumé line: another chance to prove the Trojans can win a game they are supposed to win without making it feel like a crisis.
For now, the scoreboard says 5-1. The noise around Riley says something else. 25-21 win bought Riley a little breathing room, but it did not calm the storm around his future. His massive buyout makes an immediate firing complicated, but the fanbase has clearly reached a point where simply winning is no longer enough. The comeback saved the result. It did not erase the frustration.