Opinions are opinions. Facts are facts. This fact can be interpreted and expressed any way you want, but the fact remains: TCU football coach Sonny Dykes coached in the FBS College Football National Championship. Lincoln Riley didn’t — not at Oklahoma and not at USC. It’s an uncomfortable and hard-to-ignore truth, and a storyline that cannot be ignored before USC takes on TCU in the 2025 Alamo Bowl. These two schools produced the two top vote-getters for the 2022 Heisman Trophy. USC’s Caleb Williams beat TCU’s Max Duggan for the award. However, TCU made it to the CFP that season, won a semifinal game, and faced Georgia for the national title.
Lincoln Riley is very, very close to a national championship game. In overtime of the 2018 Rose Bowl, he caught the ball at the Georgia 15.5-yard line. He chose to shoot rather than shoot. He paid a heavy price for his coach’s cowardice. Georgia won shortly after Riley showed timidity. His OU team led Georgia 31-14 but struggled in the second half. This year’s Oklahoma team also defeated SEC rival Alabama by 17 points, pushing Oklahoma’s all-time College Football Playoff record to 0-5. Lincoln Riley lost three of five games. Brent Venables has one. Riley’s former boss, Bob Stoops, was 0-1 with Venables.
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TCU football has gone nowhere the past three seasons under coach Sonny Dykes. The Horned Frogs have sunk into mediocrity under Dykes, which is exactly what most expected to happen to TCU at the start of Dykes’ tenure. Dykes was an unremarkable coach at Cal — good, but not great — so when he went to TCU, expectations weren’t high. Looking at the longer term, Dykes has basically lived up to what experts predicted he would accomplish, but in the year 2022, Dykes and TCU have surpassed all imagination and understanding. It was one of the greatest one-hit wonders and magic carpet rides in college football history.
All of us who follow USC desperately hope to have one of these seasons. People wonder what Lincoln Riley and Sonny Dykes will be talking about in the 2025 Alamo Bowl. They might swap stories about 2022. Dykes might remind Riley that, unlike his opponent, he coached in a national championship game.
This article originally appeared on Trojan Wire: Sonny Dykes coached to national championship game, not Lincoln Riley
