USC’s defense keeps running into the same wall, and the pattern is getting hard to ignore.
The Trojans have cycled through three defensive coordinators under Lincoln Riley, brought in new voices, shuffled the staff, and still five games into the 2026 season the same problems keep showing up. The names have changed. The results haven’t.
Riley’s defensive issues go back to his Oklahoma days, when his teams never got past the College Football Semifinals. At USC, the story has been just as frustrating. The Trojans missed the College Football Playoff in 2022, Riley’s first season, and then spent two years with Heisman Trophy winner Caleb Williams while the defense sat near the bottom of every statistical category under Alex Grinch.
When Riley replaced Grinch with D’Anton Lynn in 2024, he hoped a fresh approach from a coach poached from crosstown rival UCLA would change the feel of the unit. It didn’t. The same complaints kept surfacing during Lynn’s two seasons: toughness, discipline, and a defense that too often looked disconnected.
This offseason, Riley went bigger. Lynn left for Penn State, and USC responded by hiring Hall of Fame coach Gary Patterson. The Trojans also added linebacker coach Mike Ekeler and safeties coach Paul Gonzales in a broader effort to reset the staff.
But the early returns have been brutal.
The first three games of the season created some confusion because the backups and third-string players were overwhelmed in mop-up duty, making the scoreboard look a little better than the defensive play actually was. That depth problem surfaced quickly. Then USC went cross-country to Rutgers in Week 3, and it became clear the trouble went far beyond the reserves.
Rutgers, which had not played especially well against UMass and Boston College outside of receiver KJ Duff, still found plenty of room against USC. The Trojans gave up 460 yards in a 42-35 win, and without two bad interceptions by Dylan Lonergan - including a 99-yard pick-six from safety Prophet Brown - the game could have gone the other way.
Then came Oregon, which piled up more than 500 yards and put 41 points on USC. The same issues showed up again: third down, red zone defense, discipline, toughness in the trenches, no consistent pass rush, and communication problems in the secondary.
“I didn't think we did a great job tackling them on the night,” Riley said. “We missed some tackles that created some of the explosives as well, so we got to play better. We got to play tighter, and again, it's like some of those clutch downs.
“We had the great goal line stop at the end of the half, which I knew you could just tell how big that was, and I think gave us a kind of shot of momentum going in there at half. But some of the opportunities to get off the field have got to be better there.”
Patterson has been a major disappointment, but the larger issue keeps circling back to Riley. With three different defensive coordinators and nearly a decade as a head coach, the one constant in USC’s defensive collapse is the man in charge.
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