Canzano: Will USC ever be USC again?
A conversation with Petros Papadakis.
Petros Papadakis loves USC.
He remembers walking on the field at the Los Angeles Coliseum as a team captain in the late 1990s, looking around at 80,000 fans in the stands, and trying to grasp the gravity of the scene.
“There aren’t enough pores in your body when you’re that age,” he told me on Monday. “… for me, there weren’t enough pores to absorb it all.”
Papadakis, who works as a Fox Sports football analyst and radio host in Southern California, talked on Monday about the downfall of USC football, coach Lincoln Riley, UCLA’s football hire, the World Cup, Dodgermania, the demise of the legacy Pac-12, and more.
Said Papadakis: “Lincoln Riley’s not there. He doesn’t have humility; he’s not a great fit here; they had to force him to recruit the area… the whole thing has been backward from the start.”
Watch the full episode with Papadakis:
Will USC ever be USC again?
Papadakis spoke candidly about Riley’s future at USC, including what he described as an annual preseason hype fest for the program.
“There’s so much offseason hype, almost always with USC,” he said. “You look back and say, ‘Gosh, I haven’t been happy in 16 years.’ You look back and, at that time, Lane Kiffin was not a serious head football coach. Steve Sarkisian, at that time, was not a serious head football coach. Clay Helton? I don’t think anybody would argue… he was way in over his head at USC. And then, Lincoln Riley was supposed to save the football program, and it’s been a terrible sequence for him to have to join the Big Ten upon his arrival. But the truth is they aren’t physical enough and don’t have the physical will to play Big Ten teams and dominate the line of scrimmage throughout the season.”
Papadakis called Riley “a fancy pants playcaller.”
USC hired Gary Patterson as the defensive coordinator last offseason, but Papadakis wondered if that would make a difference in Riley’s system.
“It’s really hard to coordinate around a guy who is calling his own plays, and (Lincoln Riley is) the head coach,” Papadakis said.
Papadakis also talked about the World Cup games in Los Angeles, the Rose Bowl, the show that Dodgers baseball and Shohei Ohtani have become, and the football hire of Bob Chesney at UCLA.
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