Swanson: USC’s Lincoln Riley bets big on Gary Patterson at defensive coordinator

LOS ANGELES — Down to his third strike here with defensive coordinators, Lincoln Riley is betting big on Gary Patterson.

He’s pushed all his chips in on GP. It’s either going to pay off handsomely or fail miserably, because, as Patterson has spent decades telling the 840 or so players who came through his TCU program, “winning is not a sometimes thing.”

It’s all or nothing.

So, to shore up his defense, Riley has gone and grabbed a College Football Hall of Famer and two-time National Coach of the Year.

After USC’s head football coach stuck with his pal Alex Grinch too long and got stood up last season by D’Anton Lynn, who departed for a defensive coordinator job at his alma mater Penn State, Riley is rolling out the cardinal-red carpet for a defensive innovator, for the 4-2-5 defensive guru.

Riley, a Texas native with nine seasons of head coaching experience, has brought aboard Patterson, a 65-year-old TCU legend who has spent 21 of his 43 coaching years prowling the sideline as the head coach in Fort Worth. There, he lifted the small private school to unprecedented heights, including six conference titles, 11 10-win (or better) seasons, seven AP Top 10 finishes, etc., etc.

Someone so accomplished should get the benefit of the doubt. But still, there are doubts.

Patterson, the fiery, pants-hitching sideline prowler, has been sidelined from coaching since 2021, when he quit before TCU could excuse him officially, walking away eight games into the Horned Frogs’ season.

All-time, he went 181-79 at TCU, but when he walked away, the Horned Frogs were 3-5 and 18-17 in the three seasons before that.

Since 2021, Patterson has worked as an analyst at Texas and a consultant at Baylor, but he hasn’t been a full-time coach. Which, for him, is famously much more than a full-time endeavor.

The college game has changed since, of course. Athletes are no longer amateurs, even in name.

But at a fireside chat of an introductory news conference on Wednesday afternoon at USC, Patterson said he loves his profession because so many coaches remain, at heart, people who care about kids.

So he’ll be coaching these kids hard, he said, as he always has.

“The great ones wanted to be told, the good ones wanted to be coached, the bad ones – I mean, we gotta change them,” Patterson said, in a voice that has a familiar Doc Rivers-esque coach’s rasp, strained by years of exulting and exclaiming and loud, high usage.

He knows how much he can get out of players, he said. Take Jason Verrett, a cornerback who arrived at TCU as a JUCO transfer from Santa Rosa and wound up playing for the Chargers. Or Jerry Hughes, whom Patterson repositioned, taking the one-time running back and turning him into a defensive end bound for the NFL.

But it’s one thing to challenge an underrated upstart who is driven to prove the world wrong, and it’s another to get through to a heralded talent who already has the world in his hands.

At TCU, most of that program’s sustained success came during its ascent. Once it got bigger time and got into the Big 12, it got harder for the Horned Frogs to corral the likes of Robert Griffin III at Baylor, or Mike Gundy’s prolific attacks at Oklahoma State – or what the offensively gifted coach Riley was doing at Oklahoma.

“There was never anybody that was more of a pain to game-plan for,” Riley said Wednesday, “than trying to figure out how to move the ball against this guy.”

No pain, no gain, I guess, because those Sooners squads Riley headed were gainfully rewarded for the preparation. They beat Patterson’s teams all five times they met, twice scoring 52 points and scoring fewer than 30 points only once, in a 28-24 victory in 2019.

Usually the if-you-can’t-beat-them-join-them thing isn’t the victors inviting the vanquished aboard. This is different, though, considering the much wider breadth of Patterson’s accomplishments.

Which is why it really could work out wonderfully for a Trojans team that’s been searching for an adequate defensive complement to Riley’s offensive scheming.

This is a team that is also welcoming in the nation’s top-ranked recruiting class, and that’s also bound for an especially brutal Big Ten Conference slate of games, including contests in L.A. against Oregon and Ohio State and on the road against Indiana and Penn State. Patterson said he’s relishing the challenge.

This is a program that needs someone who will light a fire under the defense, that will toughen up the Trojans on that side of the ball. Who can see the field like a canvas; who, they say, knows, to the inch, where his players all should be positioned.

Someone who has known how to win – and still knows how to?