USC head coach Lincoln Riley tried to brush off the empty seats at the season opener as a one-off thing. But after Friday night, that excuse fell completely flat. Riley sits on a massive reported $60 million buyout, and the pressure on him is turning up fast. The historic L.A. Coliseum showed wide patches of empty cardinal seats for the second game in a row. Now, Trojan fans are openly calling out his claims, saying the head coach is selling a narrative that just does not match reality.

USC beat San Jose State (42-26) in its Week 0 opener, but nobody was talking about the score. Photos of half-empty sections at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum went viral, and the school announced a crowd of 51,144 in a stadium that seats 77,500. However, Riley, who is making $11.5M this season, wasn’t interested in accepting the criticism.

“This is USC, right?” Riley told the media after Tuesday’s practice before the Fresno State game. “People are gonna pay attention. People are gonna have an opinion. It’s part of being a blue-blood school. I don’t buy into the false narrative.”

At an elite program like USC, empty seats mean more than just bad optics. Top programs depend on full houses to fuel game-day income, television excitement, and alumni donations. When home crowds pull back, leadership loses revenue and momentum, turning fan disappointment into a direct threat to a head coach’s future.

Riley further went on to claim that the lie regarding the attendance debacle “comes from a lot of people who don’t follow our program.” Those people, according to the head coach, “have never stepped foot into The Coliseum.”

That defense might have worked if fans showed up for the second game, but they did not. When USC kicked off against Fresno State, the bleachers were still full of noticeable red gaps. Dismissing it after one game was easy, but after two back-to-back empty turnouts, it started looking like a real problem instead of a random fluke.

That is where the fan base lost its patience. On message boards and social media, Trojan fans quickly fired back at Riley’s comments. Many pointed out that paying top-tier ticket prices for a team that has struggled in big games makes no sense. The crowd was not buying his defense, and the anger online showed that people were tired of hearing excuses, but Riley is still adamant in his stance.

“Reality is that during my years here, attendance has gone up every year,” Riley said. “As has our play in The Coliseum, including running the table last year with a lot of epic atmospheres. I expect that to happen again this year.”

USC averaged 71,571 fans per home game in 2024, Riley’s best year with the program. However, those numbers dropped to 67,783 in 2025 and 51,144 on August 29 in Week 0. It was the smallest crowd of Riley’s entire tenure and the lowest USC has drawn since 2018, when the tail end of the Clay Helton era ended in a coaching change.

Riley believes the drop is more about the circumstances than about pointing at the program. Though it cannot be confirmed as the major reason for empty seats, the weather backs it up as the opener kicked off at noon in a heat advisory, with temperatures near 94 degrees and a heat index over 100. But the second game undercuts the explanation, as Friday’s kickoff was in the evening, with manageable weather.

If the heat was the main reason for the sparse Week 0 crowd, a cooler Friday night should have brought more fans through the gates. Instead, the Coliseum looked pretty much the same, pointing to other reasons, including the roster and results of the program in previous years. USC hasn’t finished higher than fourth in the conference since Riley’s first season in 2022, and winning usually does more to fill the stands than rankings alone.

USC’s schedule gives Riley plenty of opportunities to change that narrative, as the Oregon Ducks come to the Coliseum on September 26, followed by the Washington Huskies a week later and the Ohio State Buckeyes on Halloween. If the seats remain empty for those matchups, the conversation will shift from heat and traffic to whether USC fans still believe in Riley and the program’s direction.

Texas Tech Coach Joey McGuire Takes Aim at USC’s Sparse Coliseum Crowd

Texas Tech HC Joey McGuire took a shot at the situation without naming USC directly, boasting about his own program’s sellout in Lubbock.

“Not to take any shots, because I have a lot of respect for USC and Lincoln Riley, but it’s really awesome to be playing in Lubbock, Texas, knowing we’re going to be playing in front of 60,000, it’s going to be warm, it’s going to be every bit as warm as it was Saturday,” McGuire said, according to an X post of Justin Margolius.

McGuire further highlighted the loyalty of Texas Tech’s fan base, citing that such strong fan support can persist regardless of weather, which has consistently turned out in large numbers for home games.

The weather is still part of the conversation, even for Friday’s game. Traffic layered on top of it, Michael Duarte of The California Post specifically pointed on social media to “Angelenos stuck in Friday night Labor Day traffic” as a factor keeping fans away from a night kickoff during a holiday weekend, a scheduling wrinkle that had nothing to do with temperature.

Coming off a Week 0 opener where the National Weather Service had issued an extreme heat advisory and the Los Angeles Fire Department reported 15 medical incidents, it’s fair to say conditions haven’t done USC any favors this season. But with two straight home dates now showing the same empty rows, weather and traffic can only carry the explanation so far before the results on the field become the more obvious answer.