Is USC Trojans Head Coach Lincoln Riley College Football’s LeBron James?

By now, you’ve probably all heard the ridiculous Lincoln Riley-related comments from SEC and ESPN media personality Paul Finebaum over the past week.

During Monday’s SEC Media Day , Finebaum went off the rails proclaiming that Riley’s 2023 season was the “worst coaching job he’s ever seen,” and that if he were USC’s athletic director, “Riley would have been fired by the end of the season.”

That wasn’t to be outdone by declaring the 2024 Trojan season will have similar results to last fall, culminating with Riley’s pink slip where “he would be lucky to get an assistant job in the NFL.”

In the words of JJ Reddick, this is clearly Finebaum “engagement farming,” but it begs the question: why is Finebaum’s spin of Lincoln Riley getting so many eyeballs? After all, Finebaum wouldn’t keep going back to this viewership well if it wasn’t going viral. Ladies and gentlemen, the answer is the 2024 USC Trojan version of Lincoln Riley is subtly and deeply synonymous with the 2011 Miami Heat version of LeBron James.

Related: Paul Finebaum’s Hate For Lincoln Riley Is Reaching Levels Of Weird

Is USC Trojans Head Coach Lincoln Riley College Football’s LeBron James?

Let’s take a walk down memory lane to the summer of 2010 where over a 24-hour period LeBron James proclaimed he was “taking his talents to South Beach” followed up by the infamous “not 5, not 6, not 7…” couplets of bravado speaking to how many championships the Heat would win because of this free agency coup.

The Heat would go on to shockingly fall flat in the 2011 NBA Finals versus the Dallas Mavericks, with James indelibly and historically choking from a statistical perspective over the six-game stanza. James brought transcendent talk but couldn’t justify the walk.

Fast forwarding to the winter of 2021 where offensive genius and quarterback whisperer Riley was royally introduced to the backdrop of the legendary Coliseum by the likes of billionaire Rick Caruso, Carol Folt, and Mike Bohn.

Riley wasted no time in poetically articulating that the Coliseum would become the “Mecca of college football” under his stewardship.  The Trojans would then follow up a promising 2022 campaign with a stunningly disappointing 8-5 season despite having the sport’s best player as its signal caller. Riley is now enduring and indulging in the same rhetoric that James did over a decade ago.

James became the butt of all jokes that summer of 2011, much to the chagrin of his longtime critics. Fans universally despise when Muhammad Ali swagger isn’t backed up with Muhammad Ali results.

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Today, LeBron is truly one of the all-time greats of basketball, at the epicenter of just about every GOAT debate. He reengineered that narrative by being the centerpiece of multiple championships in Miami followed by an iconic crown in Cleveland, exemplified by a historic 3-1 comeback against a 73-win team.

For Riley to do the same, he needs to bring title #12 to the Cardinal & Gold in an emphatic fashion. Not a double-digit win season, not a playoff berth, not even a championship appearance…but the whole enchilada.

Until then, the unfortunate truth is that the Paul Finebaum’s of the world will have an instantly massive audience every time Riley’s name is uttered. No matter how unfair.

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