USC’s season opener against San Jose State did more than start Lincoln Riley’s fifth year in Los Angeles. It put a spotlight on the one thing Riley promised he’d fix when he arrived: the atmosphere.
Back in 2021, Riley said he was leaving Oklahoma for what he intended to build into the “Mecca of college football.” On Saturday, with USC’s 42-26 Week 0 win playing out on NBC and not much else commanding attention across the sport, the conversation had little to do with the Trojans’ performance and everything to do with the sight of a half-empty Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
The game kicked off at noon local time, and the crowd looked more like a matinee audience than a college football crowd. Social media wasted no time turning the empty seats into the story of the day, with fans piling on USC’s turnout and others offering the kind of excuses that never seem to fly in places where football is treated like the main event.
Riley’s old words came back with force. During his introductory press conference in 2021, he said, “We plan on building the best roster in the country, and inside that locker room, the best culture in the country," Riley said during his introductory press conference in 2021.
"(The Coliseum) is gonna be full. This will be the Mecca of college football."
That hasn’t happened. The Coliseum is not the Mecca of college football.
The announced attendance for the opener was 51,144, though that number is always taken with a grain of salt. USC averaged 67,782 fans at home last season while going 9-4 in its first Big Ten schedule, and the Coliseum’s capacity is 77,500. Under Riley, the stadium has only been filled to that number eight times.
The contrast with Oklahoma was impossible to ignore. In 2025, the Sooners averaged 83,532 at home while going 10-3 and making it back to the College Football Playoff under Brent Venables, who took over after Riley left.
Venables has spent four seasons in Norman and has only coached in front of a sold-out home crowd. Oklahoma has sold out every regular-season home game since the start of the 1999 season.
That streak is set to keep rolling Friday night, when the Sooners open against UTEP. The opponent is modest, and the forecast calls for a high of 97 degrees, but none of that is expected to matter. In Norman, the seats stay full.
At USC, the empty ones told the story.
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