Musings from Arledge: Is Gary Patterson the right choice right now for the USC Trojans?

This is not the hire I expected, and it certainly wasn’t the process I expected. 

When it became clear that D’Anton Lynn was likely gone and Pete Kwiatkowski was available, it looked like a quick and easy upgrade at defensive coordinator. Lynn’s defense underperformed in 2025 and in ways that raised all kinds of red flags—namely, they failed when it came to fundamentals and effort. You can’t be good without those things, and therefore I was glad to see him go. 

I think Lynn is probably a good coach, but I think he’s more of a pro coach—or a guy who can coordinate experienced players who are already fundamentally sound. He badly misjudged what he had upfront last year, and he couldn’t find a way to get his guys to do the simple things, like play downhill and fill holes from the LB position or set the edge. Or play hard in the first half or on 3^rd and 20 in overtime. 

Being that Pete K is one of the better D coordinators in college football over the last two decades and seemed available, it all seemed easy.

But nothing, it seems, is easy with USC football, and here we are. After a surprisingly lengthy delay, we now know who USC’s next defensive coordinator will be a big name, and it’s not Pete K. It’s actually a much bigger name—a College Football Hall of Famer, no less. Welcome Gary Patterson.

And I’m still not sure what to think about it. But the potential upside is enormous.

Let’s start with this, because I should be upfront with my biases. No, I am not willing to trust Lincoln Riley when it comes to his defensive hires. I know too much to be that foolish. He has not earned and does not deserve that trust.

Do you need a reminder why? This is Lincoln Riley in early 2023 talking about Alex Grinch:

“I know what he’s made of. I just do. I know what’s getting ready to happen defensively. And so, I just have a confidence and a belief there, not just in Alex, but the other guys in the room.” 

Lincoln Riley knew what was getting ready to happen defensively? Let me give a quick review for those who fortunate enough to have missed the 2023 season. Only months after Lincoln Riley gave this quote, Riley’s Trojans gave up 41 points to Colorado, 41 to Arizona, 48 to Notre Dame, 34 to Utah, 49 to Cal (!), 52 to Washington, 36 to Oregon, and 38 to UCLA. In consecutive games. That’s more than 42 points per game over the last eight games of the regular season. I could go into the gory details of yards per game and yards per play or advanced stats like success rate. I could show the same clips I showed years ago of horrific scheme issues. But why? You don’t need detail. You already know that USC had one of the worst defenses in the country in 2023 and one of the worst defenses in USC history.

Lincoln Riley said he knew what was getting ready to happen defensively. Well, I had my own prediction at the time. And I was a lot closer to being right than Lincoln Riley was.

Riley then badly overestimated his defensive front in 2025. I’m not going to dredge up Riley and staff’s offseason quotes about how good this group was going to be. I’ve done it before, and you can find them yourself. Riley thought his defense was going to be good. It wasn’t. It was undisciplined and often lazy. Fortunately, it didn’t have to play against many good offenses, because every good offense it saw, stole its lunch money and shoved it in a locker.

So I am very nervous about the reports that Lincoln Riley was looking for a defensive coordinator who would keep all of the defensive assistants. With the exception of Doug Belk and Trovon Reed, those assistants did a poor job last year. The defensive line and linebackers were downright bad. So why would Riley insist on keeping assistants who, for whatever reason, could not get through to their players? 

If that really were Riley’s position, he must have thought the problem was largely about D’Anton Lynn’s scheme—which, to be fair, probably was a contributing factor—because the alternatives were that USC had players who couldn’t grasp their assignments (which seems to be Lynn’s theory) or position coaches who couldn’t teach. And, note, most of those players are coming back and without any clear elite help from the transfer portal.  

And while I have questions about Lynn’s scheme probably asking too much from some of his players (especially the linebackers), I wonder when Riley concluded the scheme wasn’t good enough. Riley had seen Lynn’s scheme in 2023 (when Lynn was at UCLA) before he hired him, and he certainly became familiar with Lynn’s scheme in 2024 … so when, exactly, did it get bad in his eyes?  

All of this is to say that the delay in hiring the coordinator and the rumors about Riley’s insistence on keeping all of the defensive assistants made me very nervous. Make me nervous, I should say. I simply don’t trust Riley’s judgment when it comes to defense. 

And after hearing Riley talk about how the phone is ringing off the hook, color me a little surprised that he’s hiring a defensive coordinator who didn’t exactly appear to be a hot commodity. I’m not convinced a 65-year-old guy who hasn’t coached for the last four seasons had his phone ringing off the hook. (He did work as a special assistant/consultant for two of those four seasons.) 

That being said, this hire might yet work. Because Gary Patterson was once a great defensive coach. And maybe, just maybe, he still is.

Understand as you listen to the complaining from USC fans who don’t like the hire: Patterson is one of the great defensive coaches in recent college football history. He was one of the great innovators of recent college football. He ran a 4-2-5—which has become the norm in college football because of spread offenses and the RPO game—which allowed him to have more speed to deal with offensive players in space and more flexibility to attack offenses in unexpected ways. And he added wrinkles that were unusual and highly effective. Traditionally, the defensive call for the defensive front and the secondary was related. That made sense because you want to make sure the two groups are on the same page. If, for example, you’re rushing six, you want to make sure your secondary can match up with the available receivers and is prepared to defend the short pass. There’s very little point in bringing six to cause immediate pressure while leaving your secondary in a soft coverage with huge cushions. 

It was Patterson who separated the front from the secondary; his front six and back five would have completely different calls. They might be unrelated in any traditional sense. Even stranger, while football traditionally required coaches to make a choice between man and zone coverage, Patterson devised a system in his secondary to combine the two. The quarterback wouldn’t necessarily know before the snap which type of defense he was facing—he couldn’t know because that decision often wouldn’t be made by the defense until after the snap as the routes developed. Patterson even split up the secondary into strong and weak sides, and those two sides might be in different coverages depending on how the routes on each side developed.

If it sounds complicated, it certainly was for opposing offenses. Patterson’s defenses were good, and Patterson took a pedestrian TCU football program and made it elite. His teams led the nation in total defense five times. In the 16 years between 2002 and 2017, Patterson’s teams won at least 10 games 11 times. That’s an astronomical number for a program of TCU’s stature. TCU finished in the top 10 seven times in 13 years. Again, remarkable. And they went 13-0 with a Rose Bowl win and a final number two ranking in 2010.

Patterson isn’t a coach who was elected to the Hall of Fame just because of longevity; he didn’t get admitted because he somehow managed to stick around for a long time. He was a very good coach, and a big part of that success was his defense. Lincoln Riley was not going to hire a coach with a better defensive resume than that. Because coaches with a defensive resume better than that are named Saban, Smart, and Carroll.  

Patterson was not just an innovator with his X’s and O’s, he was also a legendary scouter of his opponents. Opponents who talk about Patterson talk about his ability to identify tendencies and attack the weak spots of an offense.  He was, by all accounts, a major problem for opposing offensive coordinators.

He was also a first-rate talent evaluator.  At TCU you couldn’t land blue chips; they went to OU, Texas, and other major powers. So Patterson identified the guys who fell through the cracks, and then he won lots of games with them and turned them into NFL players. This is a critical skill and, if we’re being blunt, a huge problem for USC’s defensive staff recently. This staff missed on too many portal players, and they badly overestimated their defensive front.  They just didn’t understand what they had.  And they went with a linebacker room that clearly wasn’t ready.

USC could use an elite talent evaluator on the defensive side, someone who can match Riley’s ability to scout skill positions on the offensive side. Gary Patterson is probably that guy.

So Gary Patterson was a great defensive coach. Full stop. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.

The big question is whether he’s still a great defensive coach. Or even a good one. Because I’d definitely take a good one right now.

There are a few potential question marks, and they’re big. 

One question is whether Patterson’s defense—built for the wide-open Big 12—is the right fit for the Big Ten. I’ve heard USC fans who are skeptical, but I don’t see much concern here. Yes, there are some three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust offenses in the Big Ten. You know what you call them? The bad offenses. You don’t build your defense around being able to stop Iowa. Iowa stops Iowa. They’re going to score 17-23 points. Whatever. Just score more. The good offenses in the Big Ten, the Ohio States and Oregons, are teams that run the spread and are balanced. You need to figure out how to beat them. Patterson’s 4-2-5 gives you the speed and flexibility to do that if you have talent, discipline, and play well.

The second question is whether the game has passed by Gary Patterson or whether Patterson himself has slowed down. I suspect not, but we’ll see. Certainly, his last four years at TCU are a concern, and his relative lack of activity the last four years is also a concern. I’m not sure we know what to make of this yet, and I wasn’t close enough to TCU football to have a solid opinion on what went wrong.

But I will say that having a program start to fall apart at the end doesn’t necessarily mean that Patterson can’t still coach defense. Head coach and coordinator are very different positions. I would have no hesitation hiring Lincoln Riley to be an offensive coordinator. He was great at that role. I have significant reservations about Riley as a head coach. He hasn’t yet proven he knows how to build a program. Two different jobs, and the coordinator position is easier for an X’s and O’s savant like Patterson (or Riley). It doesn’t matter why the TCU program fell off at the end.  What matters is whether Patterson is still an elite defensive mind.

The last reservation, and it’s a big one, is that Patterson’s defense might be too complicated for today’s college football. Most of Patterson’s success came in a day when transferring was difficult and, for the player, costly. Now transferring is easy. A player isn’t happy? He just grabs his phone, opens the new College Football Tinder App, and starts swiping right for the programs he likes, which tend to be available with false promises and bags of cash. In the old days, players would sit for a couple of years and learn the team’s offense or defense. It was commonplace, and whether players liked it or not, they didn’t have much of a choice. Now they have nothing but choice.

So the question is whether you can put a young superstar on the field and have him understand the nuances of Patterson’s defense. If you can, this hire could be good. If you can’t, this hire will be a disaster.

Remember, at least part of the problem last year seemed to be Lynn’s insistence that his players, particularly at linebacker, read the defense and make decisions that they just weren’t equipped to make. If Patterson’s defense is more of the same, USC is in trouble. The Trojans need to improve now, and USC will be relying on young guys to play next year since most of the talent on the roster is young. If you’re running a system those guys can’t grasp for a couple of years, Riley should probably dust off his resume, because it will be time for him to go.

We’ll see if Patterson works. It seems risky to bet your career on a coach that hasn’t been coaching for four years and hasn’t had any success in eight. It would be especially risky to bet your career on a coach like that and then tell him to keep the assistant coaches you hired before him that may not know his defense and didn’t do a very good job last year in a defense they presumably did know. 

But it appears that Riley was more flexible when it comes to the existing assistants than had been reported. There are already rumors that changes are coming. And that means Riley might be willing to let Gary Patterson do his job.

And while I know some fans are nervous about losing assistant coaches because they don’t want the players to become unhappy and leave, just remember that the only thing worse than losing an assistant coach might be promoting one of those assistants to defensive coordinator just to make some teenage player happy. 

Obviously Riley wants to keep his top-ranked recruiting class and land another stellar class in 2027, which he probably will with Chad Bowden, USC’s NIL program, and a quality staff. That makes sense. You can’t be an elite team without elite talent.  

You also can’t be an elite team with great salesmen who don’t know how to coach. I’m not saying USC’s assistants can’t coach. Rob Ryan has a ton of experience and had a lot of NFL success. Eric Henderson was, by all accounts, an excellent NFL position coach. But it’s not yet clear that either of them knows how to coach college kids. If they do, we certainly didn’t see it last year. And I’m not sure what Shaun Nua brings to the table right now. He had more talent than anybody—Crawford, Lucas, and Shelby were all elite recruits with plenty of talent and some experience—but his guys didn’t know how to keep contain and didn’t develop pass-rush moves. 

All of which is to say this. It’s bad enough to hold onto assistant coaches who are great recruiters but cannot coach. Once you figure out you have a guy like that, you should replace him. Always. USC was scared to remove Donte Williams because of his recruiting prowess, but the guy couldn’t develop players, and after he left, USC’s recruiting at corner got better. You don’t keep salesman who can’t teach. Eventually, people see the results and go elsewhere.

And you certainly don’t promote them to higher positions. That’s what Clay Helton did when he turned Tee Martin, a good wide receivers coach and excellent recruiter, into his offensive coordinator. That move failed, as you might expect it would.

I’m not saying USC’s assistants can’t coach. I am saying other than Doug Belk, who has proven his prowess as a position coach at USC, and Trovon Reed, whose group seemed to get better, USC had a lot of defensive assistants whose groups looked lost last year. They didn’t play with sound fundamentals, and up front they frequently didn’t play hard. Yes, they recruit pretty well, especially Eric Henderson. Now it’s time for them to show they can coach college kids. And if Riley and Patterson have doubts, you’re better off replacing them with guys who you are sure can coach college kids. And maybe guys who have some experience with Patterson’s system.  

What’s the bottom line? I’d feel a whole lot better if this hire had taken place some years ago. I’d feel better if I simply trusted Riley to make sound decisions for the defense. But, right now, nobody has any reason to believe he knows how to do that. And ultimately, I’m cautiously optimistic about the older guy who was undeniably great and hope he has some tread on the tires. And I’m willing to bet that Gary Patterson will not tolerate the sort of undisciplined play and lack of effort we saw from last year’s team. That would be a pretty good start.

We wanted Riley to hire somebody proven with a great track record.  Well, he did that.  Now we just wait and see whether 2026 Gary Patterson is still close to the guy who won national coach of the year in 2009 and 2014.  If he is, Lincoln Riley just hit a homerun.