LA Times interview with USC AD

www.latimes.com

USC athletic director Jennifer Cohen shares her views on football coach Lincoln Riley, how she is adapting to a new pay era in college sports and more.

The link is prob behind a paywall, I cut and pasted relevant quotes in case you can’t open it.

“This industry is changing so much, so rapidly, that we’re always in conversations and evaluating everything that we need. What resources do we need? What pieces do we need to put in place to be successful? So it’s not an end-of-the-year conversation. It’s ongoing. I’m pleased with the progress we’ve made since the end of the season and in the offseason. I think he’s done an excellent job of putting together a great coaching staff. We worked really hard to keep a number of talented coaches and to retain them. Consistency is so important, so I’m really pleased with that. I thought we made some really good additional hires that complement the staff, both from an experience and a development standpoint, as well as a recruiting standpoint."

On the new GM position:

"We were looking for a unicorn. Because these college GM jobs are so unique, you know? You can’t just say you’re the NFL now — you’re not. We’re still a college football program with a bunch of different complexities that don’t exist in the NFL, but there’s best practices in the NFL that we needed to implement. So finding Chad and his excitement about Chad and his belief in him, Chad’s belief in Lincoln, was a real win-win for USC. I’m excited about it... To your point, when you’re looking at people who only had NFL backgrounds, it wasn’t that they didn’t understand recruiting or have those relationships, it was that they also didn’t have the experience of knowing how to navigate in a university setting or in NIL or in dealing with donors and all these other aspects that are part of ecosystem of a college athletic department and a college football program. We were open to that. We figured no matter who we hired, we were going to have to supplement skills and expertise around them regardless. That’s why we’re building out an entire infrastructure around Chad."

On CLR:

"Lincoln has the experience, right? He’s built and led championship teams before. And so my focus with him is just investing and giving him — and not just him, but his entire coaching staff, his support staff that he has around him every resource possible to get to the next level... I just think we have high expectations. He has them and I have them. Yeah, we’re just working together to get there."

Question: When we talked after the 2023 season — as USC finished 8-5 — you called it “disappointing” and just said last year’s finish “doesn’t meet expectations.” What do you need to see from the program to show it’s on an upward trajectory?

Cohen: What I can say is that USC is a special place and that we’re aligned and we’re resourced in a way to compete in what is a very evolving and changing landscape. And that we as a department, him as a coach, me as an AD, us as a university — we have to keep adapting to that. I feel like we just have to go execute. We just have to go execute. And I feel really confident in the resources that we’ve put into this program. We know we can do it here because it’s been done here before. I’m just ready for spring ball to start to see some of these new faces we have."