USC athletic director Mike Bohn walked his new football coach Lincoln Riley across the top of the Coliseum on Monday, with the Los Angeles skyline and San Gabriel Mountains as the backdrop, and with each step he punctuated a loud and clear message.
The time for pleasantries has come to an end.
The West Coast’s preeminent college-football power had done this conventionally forever. The Trojans found Pete Carroll when he was a failed NFL coach, coming off a year off, and his successor was Lane Kiffin, a former Carroll assistant who’d landed at Tennessee. After that, the program poached Steve Sarkisian, another former Carroll lieutenant and Kiffin staff-mate, from Washington, and promoted Clay Helton, who’d been a Sarkisian assistant.