Lincoln Riley takes the blame for USC's overtime loss to Penn State

Following USC's latest Big Ten loss, Trojan fans had to be curious to hear what head coach Lincoln Riley had to say. Certainly, after seeing his team fall to 1-3 in Big Ten play after a 33-30 overtime defeat, he was not in the best of moods. However, he did praise his team for playing hard.

"All right, hard-fought game, just a really difficult loss," he said. "There's really no way to sugarcoat that. Our guys fought their ass off from beginning to end. As a coach, you can't ask for anything more than the effort our guys put on the field. It's two good football teams going at it. It came down to the last play.

Again, it hurts, obviously, to not be able to get this done. We've had obviously a few games like this where we've had chances to win right there at the end, and to not make the plays, not have some of the breaks bounce your way, it's a gut-punch. There's no doubt about it. So we're very disappointed to not finish it off. I'm proud of the way that the guys fought, I'm proud of the way that the team played, gave ourselves a lot of opportunities to win it there in the end, so we've got some work to do. We definitely made some critical errors in some of these games that we haven't won where we've had opportunities to finish teams off."

It didn't take long for someone to ask Riley about his thought process during his team's final possession of regulation. He explained why he let the clock roll instead of using his timeouts.

"Yeah, we talked about it a little bit," he said. "When we had the lost yardage play, I think it was the first down, we kind of at that point started to talk about, 'All right, do we need to use timeouts and stop the clock?' I think that was a second-and-12, if I remember right. We were talking about it, do we need to use timeouts and stop the clock there because all of a sudden it's second-and-12.

"If you don't get anything there then it's third-and-12 and you just potentially bought them a series and we weren't in field goal range yet. We went back and forth on do we use them and stop the clock, or not? And we felt, honestly I felt so good about how Mike was hitting the ball that we said, 'You, know what' -- when we got to a third-and-6 there 'if we convert this we still got timeouts to maybe go one more shot, and then obviously let him kick the field goal.' How well Mike was kicking it, I think, was the biggest reason I wanted to make sure it was the last possession."

The next question he took seemed to irritate Riley. He was asked when the responsibility for losses falls on his shoulders and he took exception to that question.

"It always falls to me," he said. "When have I ever responsibility? I always take it. I'm the head coach. It's all my job. Believe me, there isn't nobody taking more responsibility than I am. I don't know where that line of questioning comes from.

"Yeah, I think it is -- it's the good and bad of it and it both exists. The reality is we've played the toughest schedule in the country the first six games, we've had a chance to win every single game. That's hard to do, to put yourself in position to win these games is frickin hard to do to begin with, so we're doing a lot of good.

"And I understand that that good's not going to get seen by the outside right now because they're going to focus on the record and the fact that we've lost three games on the last play, and I understand it. That's part of it. We all understood this when signed up for big boy football, so I get it. We've got to do a better job at the end of games, I have to do a better job, our coaches, our players, because we're doing too many good things to put us in situations where we have the lead and we can win, but we gotta get paid off for it. We gotta be able to finish, and it all falls on my shoulders at the end. That's part of why they call me head coach."

Riley was then asked what needs to happen for his team to start having more success. He said that all sides of the ball have to be better.

"I think it's all sides," he said. "I think you could look at all sides. We've had opportunities on offense, we've had opportunities on defense. Offense had the ball obviously with a chance to go score with 2 minutes and change and all the timeouts. Defensively, we got them to two fourth-and-longs on the series before where you like your chances on both of those and they make two kind of crazy plays. So we've all had our chances. We all own in it. We've got to coach better, we've got to play better offense, we've got to play better defense in those moments."

Another question that seemed to get under Riley's skin centered around what moment from the game he would be thinking about later in the night. For whatever reason, he didn't take kindly to that question.

"Man, we do this for a living, like this is our life," he said. "I didn't see my kids four nights this week. This is what we do. I think about this every second and when I go to sleep I dream of it and I wake up thinking about it. So, I'll think about all of it. The thing I'm not going to do, and our team's not going to do, is I'm not going to let the things we have to get better or the things that didn't go our way shield the great things that are happening in that locker room, on this defense, on this offense and in this program.

"I am not going to let that happen, personally, because I've been in this long enough, man -- everybody's going to hit their adversity, that's part of it, and you either stand up and fight or you bow down. And I'm not about to bow down."

Finally, Riley was asked about the Penn State players planting their school's flag on the mid-field USC logo at the Coliseum.

"I don't get caught up in all that," he said. "I mean, that's all stuff outside the game. We're very proud of our program, we don't take a backseat to anybody and that's all I would say."