Why NBC is betting big on Lincoln Riley orchestrating a USC turnaround
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- NBC has featured USC six times in nine games, making the Trojans its West Coast anchor as the network tries to compete with ABC’s dominant prime-time college football audience.
- The network is betting Lincoln Riley can revive national interest in USC, with Saturday’s game against No. 2 Ohio State at the Coliseum offering the Trojans a prime-time chance to play spoiler.
When NBC’s production team came to meet with Lincoln Riley, ahead of a broadcast earlier this month, the USC football coach greeted the group like old friends.
“Look,” Riley joked, “the Trojan Network is back.”
He certainly should be familiar with the group by now, given that this week’s matchup with No. 2 Ohio State marks the sixth time in nine games that USC will be featured on NBC. That’s already tied for the most any one network has aired a Big Ten team since 2024, when the conference expanded to 18 teams.
“We certainly feel like we’re the voice of the Trojans at the moment,” Noah Eagle, NBC’s lead play-by-play announcer, told The Times prior to USC’s loss to Wisconsin last week.
Amid rising tensions as Lincoln Riley has fallen short of leading USC to the College Football Playoff, he insists he is the right fit for the Trojans,
It’s certainly an ironic match, considering NBC’s longtime affiliation with the Trojans’ bitter rival, Notre Dame. But going all-in on the Cardinal and Gold wasn’t necessarily the network’s plan going into the season, according to Justin Byczek, NBC’s executive vice president of programming and rights management. It just worked out that way.
“It’s effectively a draft, and we’re trying to look at different weeks and prioritize,” Byczek said. “One of the first things that jumped out at us was how important that Oregon game is going to be. So that was something that we had in our back pocket going into the draft.”
When the three networks divided up the Big Ten’s TV games last spring, Byczek said NBC also zeroed in on that game, as well as USC’s matchups with Ohio State and Penn State, knowing both would fit well featured in prime time.
Just by virtue of its geography and its brand, USC makes for a natural fit in NBC’s prime-time slot (7:30/4:30 p.m. ET/PT), similar to how Fox’s Big Noon Saturday regularly features Ohio State in its early window.
Those prime-time matchups featuring the Trojans, though, have lagged a bit behind other top teams from the Big Ten and SEC. USC’s matchup with Oregon drew the largest audience of its season to date, with 5 million viewers on NBC and Peacock. That’s the only time this season that a USC game has finished in the top five of the week’s most viewed games, according to Nielsen data.
No. 16 USC sees its playoff hopes take a serious hit in a 24-7 loss to Wisconsin following what was arguably the Trojans’ worst performance of the season on offense.
That’s a conference-wide issue. The Big Ten has only had the week’s most-watched game twice this season, once on CBS (Ohio State-Iowa in Week 5) and another time on Fox (Ohio State-Indiana, Week 7). Otherwise, ABC has dominated, with more than 10 million tuning in most weeks to the network’s prime-time game.
So, in order to compete with ABC in prime time, NBC is betting on Riley and the Trojans as its West Coast anchor.
“Because they’re intriguing — not only in Los Angeles, but nationally,” Eagle said. “College football fans want to see if they can get over the hump. Can Lincoln Riley get them there?”
That question will no doubt come up on the broadcast this week. And with three Big Ten games still left after that, you can bet it won’t be the last time we hear it asked on NBC.
