Early riser: Lincoln Riley helps revive Oklahoma offense
MULESHOE, Texas — At times during the installation that spring, David Wood couldn’t help but shake his head. Five years earlier, Lincoln Riley had quarterbacked Muleshoe High School. And now here he was, so young but so self-assured, teaching his former coaches the intricacies of coach Mike Leach’s “Air Raid” offense.
“We really thought he knew exactly what he was talking about,” says Wood, then and now Muleshoe High’s head coach. “We were just coaching him a few years earlier. But he always had something special about him.”
Serious college football fans have gotten acquainted with Riley this season, his first at Oklahoma, as he has led an offensive resurgence that was a catalyst for the Sooners' surprising ascent to the College Football Playoff. They face Clemson in an Orange Bowl semifinal Thursday afternoon that is anticipated as a matchup of fast-paced, explosive attacks.
“Lincoln has really transformed our offense,” says Bob Stoops, Oklahoma's head coach.
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When Stoops fired offensive coordinator Josh Heupel after the 2014 season, he looked outside for an offensive coordinator for the first time in his 17 seasons in Norman. Stoops has described the decision as wrenching, given Heupel’s status as a former OU All-American, but necessary given the Sooners’ struggles during an 8-5 season, and with the wide-open offensive style that has swept the Big 12 Conference in recent seasons.
“You’d better hold serve,” Stoops says. “Just with the tempo and the no-huddle and the quality of quarterbacks, the innovation of offense in our league is second to none.”
Noting the success of several permutations of the Air Raid version of the spread, Stoops reached back to the offensive roots of his program. Leach was his first offensive coordinator; the Sooners ran the Air Raid when they won the BCS National Championship in 2000.
“I believe in the system,” Stoops says. “We had great success in it not just in 2000, but for a lot of years.”
But in hiring Riley, he also placed the program’s future — and perhaps his own — in the hands of a 31-year-old. Still, the young coach came highly recommended.
Leach says when he and Stoops spoke, Stoops had several other candidates in mind — older, more experienced coaches. Leach suggested Riley, who had just finished his fifth season as East Carolina’s offensive coordinator.
“Lincoln wasn’t on his radar,” Leach says. “I specifically told him Lincoln was the one he needed to hire.”
Oklahoma’s players say Riley brought confidence and even swagger, promising if they would buy in, he would deliver one of the nation’s best offenses. Oklahoma is averaging 45.8 points and 542.9 yards, third and sixth in the FBS, respectively. In the second half of the season — more precisely, the seven games after an inexplicable loss to Texas — the Sooners have been nearly unstoppable. Quarterback Baker Mayfield has completed 70% of his passes. Running backs Samaje Perine and Joe Mixon have combined to help lead an attack that is averaging more than 300 rushing yards in that stretch.
Mayfield finished fourth in voting for the Heisman Trophy. Riley won the Broyles Award as the nation’s top assistant coach, and drew interest for a couple of head-coaching vacancies — though he chuckles when he says, “When you win, everybody wants you to write a book. When you lose, they question if you can read one.”
But he credits talented players who were ready for a change and hungry for success.
“They bought in from the beginning,” says Riley, who turned 32 the day Oklahoma opened the season, “and the rest is history.”
But long before he was one of the hottest coaching candidates and almost a decade before he installed the Air Raid at OU, Riley installed it at Muleshoe.
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Riley grew up in this West Texas town, which is situated on the South Plains at the intersection of U.S. highways 84 and 70. The seat of Bailey County, it’s less than 20 miles to the New Mexico border. The population hovers around 5,000, with cotton farming and ranching the primary industries.
Riley’s father Mike owns and operates the family’s cotton warehousing company in nearby Sudan, Texas. Though Lincoln Riley and his younger brother Garrett worked summers there, it was clear early they were headed for something else (Garrett, six years younger than Lincoln, followed his older brother into college coaching). Riley’s parents, Mike and Marilyn Riley, say their older son was ultra-competitive as a kid, sometimes hiding the last piece of a puzzle in order to win.
“We’d turn around and he was explaining the same thing to the (other) kids after hearing it one time,” Wood says. “He just had a remarkable memory about that stuff.”That drive, combined with what his parents and others say is a nearly photographic memory, served him well at quarterback — and along with Wood’s arrival in the late 1990s, helped Muleshoe High’s football program morph from a longtime loser into a winner. Even then, Riley was coaching.
When Riley led the Mules to the state semifinals in 2000, his junior season, “just getting there and playing was a spectacular event,” says Delton Wilhite, the Mules’ longtime radio broadcaster.
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Despite his mother’s plea — she said “coaches and preachers move around too much” — Riley went to Texas Tech planning to be a high school coach. During the spring semester of his freshman year, he tried out for the Texas Tech football team. But a few weeks in, Leach called the youngster into his office. He only planned to keep one, maybe two walk-on quarterbacks. Riley wasn’t among them.
“He was a real smart one that couldn’t throw it real well,” says Leach, then the Red Raiders’ head coach. “He was reasonably accurate, but threw it kind of side-arm. The ball floated a little bit. The competition at Tech was a little higher than it was at Muleshoe.”
But Leach had an offer. He loved Riley “from the neck up,” noting how fast he’d picked up the Red Raiders’ schemes and how he made the correct reads. He asked Riley to consider becoming a student assistant.
“He was (angry),” Leach says. “But he went home and thought about it and came back the next day and said he’d do it.”
For the next few years, Riley was essentially Leach’s personal assistant, doing everything from fetching meals to breaking down film. Like during that spring practice as a quarterback, he was a quick study. He soon became, according to Leach, the head coach’s “sounding board.”
In spring 2007, after three years as a student assistant and one as a graduate assistant, Riley was named Tech’s receivers coach. Leach figures Riley might have been the youngest assistant coach in America, or certainly at a Power Five program. And he says the move caused some jealousy among other coaches.
Riley’s confidence occasionally ruffled feathers, too. In staff meetings, “he would tell older coaches stuff they didn’t want to hear,” Leach says. “Sometimes you can get into a kind of herd mentality. But I knew he wasn’t afraid to command the room even at a young age.”
When Leach was suspended and then fired at the end of the 2009 season, Riley called plays for the Red Raiders in the Alamo Bowl — a 41-31 victory against Michigan State — and then moved on to East Carolina as offensive coordinator, where in five seasons he produced the five best statistical offenses in school history.
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Riley was just a couple of months into his new gig as the receivers coach at Texas Tech when Wood and his offensive assistant coaches made the 70-mile drive to Lubbock, Texas. They’d been running a pro-style scheme with an emphasis on the power running game, but were seeking an equalizer for a bunch of quick but small athletes.
They met with Leach and Riley. Riley did most of the talking. First, he convinced them they had to go all-in.
“ ‘You can’t mix and match this offense,’ ” Wood recalls Riley telling them. “ ‘You can’t do part-time this and part-time that.’ … We decided to go all-in.”
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From the ground up, he explained the foundation and the fundamentals of Leach’s Air Raid, breaking it down into its simplest parts. Concepts, drills, plays, everything.
“It was amazing how Leach just let him take over and teach us what we needed to be taught,” Wood says. “ … We had confidence in what he was telling us. We knew he wouldn’t lead us astray — we’re his hometown. We really thought he knew exactly what he was talking about. And sure enough, everything he said was working for us.”
Two seasons later, in 2008, they won the school’s first state championship. And the run of success, unprecedented in Muleshoe’s football history, has continued: Now a perennial playoff participant, the Mules averaged 520 yards this season.
“It’s still working,” he says, and it’s in part why he and the other Muleshoe coaches regularly watch Oklahoma’s games together — “studying it with him.”
“It’s, ’What’s Lincoln doing here? What’s he thinking here?’ ” Wood says. “He’s got a reason.”
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