Lincoln Riley explains why he's so excited about USC's wide receiver room
As the season opener fast approaches for the Trojans, head coach Lincoln Riley is trying to figure out what to do with his USC wide receiver room.
He has run into an interesting problem.
“The reality is every one of the freshmen are ready to play,” Riley said on the weekly Trojans Live program. “Every one of the transfers are ready to play. And every one of the guys that we brought back are ready to play.”
As a result, there’s a glut of talent in the USC wide receiver room and Riley will have to figure out how to sort through it.
The team officially released its depth chart on Wednesday and there were four starters listed at receiver: Kyron Hudson, Brenden Rice, Mario Williams and Dorian Singer. All have proven capable players in the past.
Singer is probably the anchor of the unit, a star at Arizona a year ago. Williams and Rice both topped 600 yards receiving last year. So too did Tahj Washington, who went for 785 yards and six scores last season but was listed as a backup on the initial 2023 depth chart.
Thus the problem for Riley. How in the world do you figure out who to play?
“That’s why we get paid, right? It’s a good room,” he said. “Looking at it right now just in August, that one room right now to me is exciting because I don’t know that there’s one guy in there that we don’t want to play. Typically even if you have a good room you might have a couple of guys that aren’t quite ready to play.”
The USC wide receiver room will debut on Saturday in a game against San Jose State, kicking off the season in Week 0. Plenty of players will be itching to show what they can do.
And given how many bodies there are in the group, it stands to reason that opportunities will be limited. Players will have to make the most of every ball thrown their way.
“Obviously it’s a good problem to have,” Riley said. “We’ll have guys in and out the lineup. We’ll use those guys a lot of different ways. Those guys are going to have prominent roles on special teams. We’ll certainly get a lot of great work and mileage out of all of them.”
USC and San Jose State will kick off at 8 p.m. ET on Saturday with a broadcast on the Pac-12 Network.