Lincoln Riley, fellow Big Ten coaches will share one unwelcome burden
The Big Ten begins a new era in 2024. Lincoln Riley will fit right in with the conference’s other top coaches, unless he can win a College Football Playoff semifinal this season with USC in the Trojans’ Pac-12 swan song.
It’s improbable but real: Riley joins Michigan’s Jim Harbaugh (0-2) and Wisconsin’s Luke Fickell (0-1, from his time at Cincinnati) as a head coach who has made the College Football Playoff but never won a semifinal on the sport’s biggest stage. Riley wasn’t a head coach in 2015, but when he was offensive coordinator at Oklahoma that season, he lost to Clemson in yet another College Football Playoff game, making him 0-4 if you count years as an assistant coach.
Ohio State coach Ryan Day won the 2020 playoff semifinal against Clemson, but he has a losing record in playoff semifinals (1-2), having lost in 2019 to Clemson and in 2022 to Georgia.
Unless Riley breaks through this year at USC, he will join Big Ten coaches in an uncomfortable situation, albeit a first-world problem as well.
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