Opinions are opinions. Facts are facts. This fact can be interpreted and opined on any way you want, but the fact does remain: TCU football coach Sonny Dykes has coached in an FBS college football national championship game. Lincoln Riley has not — not at Oklahoma and not at USC. It’s an unsettling and inconvenient truth which is an impossible-to-ignore storyline before USC meets TCU in the 2025 Alamo Bowl. The two schools produced the top two Heisman Trophy vote getters in 2022. Caleb Williams of USC beat TCU’s Max Duggan for the award. However, TCU made the CFP that season, won a semifinal game, and played Georgia for the national title.
Lincoln Riley came very, very close to the national championship game. He had the ball on the Georgia 15.5-yard line in overtime of the epic 2018 Rose Bowl game. He chose to kick a field goal instead of going for it. He paid dearly for that display of coaching cowardice. Georgia won shortly after that display of timidity from Riley. His OU team led Georgia 31-14 and then faltered in the second half. This year’s Oklahoma team similarly blew a 17-point lead to an SEC foe, Alabama, pushing the Sooners’ all-time College Football Playoff record to 0-5. Lincoln Riley has three of the five losses. Brent Venables has one. Riley’s former boss, Bob Stoops, is 0-1 alongside Venables.
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TCU football has done absolutely nothing in the past three seasons under coach Sonny Dykes. The Horned Frogs have receded into quiet mediocrity under Dykes, which is what most people expected would happen to TCU at the start of Dykes’ tenure. Dykes was an unremarkable coach at Cal — decent but hardly spectacular — so when he went to TCU, not a whole lot was expected of him. Over a longer range of years, Dykes has basically met the experts’ predictions for what he would achieve, but in that one year, 2022, Dykes and TCU transcended everyone’s imagination and comprehension. It’s one of the great one-hit wonders and magic carpet rides in college football history.
All of us who follow USC would desperately love to have just one of those seasons. One wonders what Lincoln Riley and Sonny Dykes will talk about going into the 2025 Alamo Bowl. They’ll probably trade stories about 2022. Dykes might remind Riley he has coached in a national title game, unlike his counterpart.
This article originally appeared on Trojans Wire: Sonny Dykes has coached in a national title game, not Lincoln Riley
