A changing of address

 The big news out of college football Sunday was not that Indiana coach Tom Allen didn't even wait 24 hours before firing his offensive coordinator, Nick Sheridan, or that he wanted him gone so badly he's apparently paying some of the buyout from his own pocket.

No, the big news came out of Norman, Okla., where Oklahoma football coach Lincoln Riley decided to follow the Joads to California.*

(* - Cheap, lazy "Grapes of Wrath" reference)

Anyway, Riley, one of the rising young mega-coaches in college football, is going from Oklahoma to USC, which apparently is a seismic event that could potentially alter the entire landscape of the college game. OK, so that is not exactly what the interwhatsis was saying, but it was treating this like a  BIG HUGE DEAL. 

The Blob, of course, just sees this as another really rich guy changing addresses.

This assumes USC will throw money at Riley like confetti, which undoubtedly it will. The Trojans haven't really been the Trojans since Pete Carroll blew town, but there still is a certain amount of prestige that attaches to the program, and Riley likely will be compensated accordingly.

He also will get to live in sunny SoCal, and get to use that as a recruiting selling point, and maybe get to pal around with some movie stars. A few of them might even ditch their currently-chic UCLA gear for a throwback Marcus Allen or Anthony Davis or Reggie Bush jersey.

Those sorts of things aren't going to happen in Norman, which can't even say it's L.A. without the traffic. How do you compete when the best tout you've got is you're, I don't know, The Cooler Omaha?

Other than that, though, Riley-to-USC doesn't seem so much seismic to me as simply swapping one prestigious program for another used-to-be prestigious program (which, granted, rarely happens). Football-wise, it seems like a lateral move at best; you can say Riley will be able to land the choicest recruits in glittery L.A., but he was already doing that in decidedly un-glittery Norman. 

 Of course, if Riley can at least make USC competitive again, that demonstrably would be good for the college game. It loses some shine when USC becomes a semi-automatic W for, say, Notre Dame; page back through history, and you can still hear the thunder of all those epic collisions between USC and the Irish or USC and UCLA or USC and Michigan or Ohio State in the Rose Bowl.

Maybe Riley can restore some of that thunder. Or at least find a way to beat Oregon, the Pac-12's new USC. 

A big, huge deal that might not be. But big enough, surely.