This week, the USC football team travels to Champaign, Illinois for a ranked matchup against Illinois, and Head Coach Lincoln Riley’s comments on the start time have drawn some ire from college football fans.
The game will start at 9 AM pacific time, which is a dramatic change for USC just one week after they played a game at home in the LA Coliseum at 8 PM pacific.
Riley admitted that there are definite challenges to dealing with this, and that USC’s preparations this week will look different from last week.
“Going from the absolute latest kick in the country to the absolute earliest kick in the country has its challenges, but it is what it is,” Riley said. “We don’t make the schedule, clearly. And so, we’ve had to adapt a little bit in the way that we’ve prepared…we’ve tried to be mindful of getting our work done but at the same time knowing that we need to put a fresh football team on that airplane.”
This clip drew the ire of lots of people, particularly because USC set the dismantling of the former Pac-12 in motion by announcing they were joining the Big Ten beginning in 2024.
“This is a lot of complaining,” former USC football captain Petros Papadakis wrote in a repost on X.
According to people like Papadakis, since this is the path that USC chose, playing in a conference with opponents across multiple timezones, this is a reality they are not allowed to admit is difficult.
“If you play on the West Coast in the Big Ten your home games will most likely be late, your away games will most likely be early. Why this is such a shock to USC is kinda funny,” Papadakis wrote in a separate post.
The Big Ten Scheduling Double Standard
When Michigan State had to travel to USC for a game at 8 PM pacific time this past Saturday, their fans were all over social media complaining about how unfair it was.
And that makes a lot of sense. Starting a game at what equates to 11 PM in your local time zone and ends around 3 AM is rough. It’s rough for the players on the field and the fans watching at home.
Most people recognized that and didn’t give the Spartan faithful any flak for their complaining.
But now that Coach Riley simply pointed out that the stark difference between 8 PM PT one week and 9 AM PT the next could theoretically pose some challenges for his team, for some reason he is facing a ton of backlash?
There is a clear reason why. Michigan State has been in the Big Ten since 1950 while it’s only USC’s second year in the conference. People don’t want to hear any “negativity” from the new California school.
Part of it is also because USC has always been a hated program nationally because of their history of success. People that are fans of underdog teams always hate programs that win a lot.
But also, Lincoln Riley seems to face an unfair amount of scrutiny for his comments since becoming a USC Coach. Whether he is positive, negative or neutral, opposing fans and even USC fans love to take his comments out of context and try to stir up controversy.
Again, if people want to see the difference between what complaining really is and the very mild comments Lincoln Riley made this week, look no further than Michigan State fan accounts on social media last week.
Blame The TV Networks!
If there is a common enemy of all of these people, whether it is Michigan State fans, Pac-12 loyalists or even Lincoln Riley himself, it is the TV networks.
The networks all care about one thing: making money. Scheduling the games every week is such a meticulous process because each TV network is trying their best to maximize their ratings and revenue.
They do not factor time zones or the wellbeing of student athletes into their decisions. Their only calculus is financial.
So instead of turning on other fans or teams whenever there’s a scheduling disagreement or even difficulty, fans should realize who they really need to hold accountable: the people making the TV schedule.
USC fans, what do you think of this whole situation?
