Preseason coaching rankings place Lincoln Riley outside the top 15, but Oklahoma’s CFP run remains the standard

USA TODAY Sports college football experts, as cited by Yahoo Sports, have Lincoln Riley ranked outside the top 15 in their preseason coaching evaluation. The argument is not that Riley is unproven as a game planner or recruiter. It is that his recent body of work does not align with the standard he set at Oklahoma during the College Football Playoff era’s early, four-team format.

Riley’s highest public profile season remains 2020, when his Oklahoma Sooners pushed deep into the national title conversation and made the Playoff stage part of their routine. According to the Yahoo Sports account of the USA TODAY Sports experts’ assessment, Oklahoma made three straight College Football Playoff appearances under Riley when the postseason bracket was still limited to four teams.

That stretch mattered because it was paired with a run of conference dominance. The experts point to Oklahoma winning four consecutive Big 12 championships from 2017 through 2020, along with a New Year’s Six bowl berth each season during that span. In the way college football reputations are formed, that combination of conference titles and repeated postseason trips is the kind of sustained excellence that generally earns a coach a top-of-the-sport ranking.

The experts also frame the ranking as a reflection of expectations after Riley’s move. The Yahoo Sports description notes that in 2022, after Riley’s first season at USC, he still had a claim to being a top-five coach in the sport. Their current position suggests that whatever momentum looked plausible in his early USC period has not been enough, in their view, to keep him in that elite tier now.

This kind of preseason coaching list is often less about a coach’s ceiling and more about the present case for winning at the very top of the sport. Riley’s case has always been tied to his ability to produce championship-level offenses and take programs to consistent playoff contention. Placing him outside the top 15 indicates that the experts believe the sport has moved on, at least relative to where his teams have finished under his watch in the USC years.

At the same time, there is a clear caveat embedded in the evaluation. Riley’s Oklahoma era provides a long runway of evidence that he can build and maintain an offense capable of carrying a roster to the sport’s biggest stages. The controversy, or at least the skepticism reflected by the ranking, is about whether USC’s current trajectory matches the peak he set, not whether he has proven he can do it.

For USC and for Riley personally, the list sets up the central narrative question for the coming season: can he reestablish a top-five-caliber pattern of performance, the kind that translates into College Football Playoff-level results rather than just competitive seasons? Coaches do not get credit on lists for what they have already done decades later. They get credit for repeatable outcomes in the current moment, and this ranking suggests the experts want to see that repetition again before they move him back into the sport’s highest tier.