Swanson: USC’s Lincoln Riley might want to win a press conference

LOS ANGELES — That there’s much discourse at all about anything Lincoln Riley has said says a lot, I think, about how things are going at USC.

As it is, his Trojans football team – unranked this week after checking in at No. 11 two weeks ago – will host No. 4 Penn State in a win-or-kiss-playoffs-goodbye game Saturday afternoon at the Coliseum.

Before that, Riley ended Tuesday’s practice by addressing the few-days-old controversy of Minnesota’s game-winning fourth-and-goal score: “Unfortunate for us …” but not, he said, why USC lost.

He tripled down on why being a couple of plays away from being 5-0 instead of 3-2 is a sign of progress. And he went back to the Michigan loss on Sept. 21 to defend his offensive line: “I own a lot of that,” he said. “I screwed us up in our silent count … obviously they weren’t perfect, but they had somethings working against them that game that were not their fault, that were mine.”

I appreciated that part, because it reminded me that Riley is not allergic to such accountability, even if his default setting seems set to spin, deflect and on occasion to insist the emperor is fully clothed.

Which wouldn’t matter a lick if the Trojans were 5-0, and not by the hairs on their chinny chin chins. If they were consistently scoring high marks on the football field, the little postgame quizlets wouldn’t carry much weight at all.

Get all-A’s on the gridiron and you can give any answer you want on the question-and-answer oral exams after every game. You could ball up the test and shoot it at the waste basket. Insult the proctor. Your fans won’t care.

But when you’re not scoring particularly well on the field, those annoying postgame quizzes start to affect your cumulative score, start to weigh on how you’ll be viewed by all the people grading you and your disposition, your preparation, your credibility.

So last season, when you told reporters – and by proxy, one of L.A.’s most demanding fan bases – the defense that was allowing the 436.9 yards and 34.5 points per game, 119th and 121st most in the nation, was improving if you were watching with a “trained eye,” you were bound to get a dizzying amount of eyerolls.

When you proclaim that defensive tackle Bear Alexander’s viral-going discontent was a media-driven attempt to make something of a non-story, only to turn around the next day and describe his decision to redshirt as a “surprising” plot twist, you’re only adding fuel to the notion that you might be guilty of gaslighting.

The same goes when you try to parse the notion of a slow start – say, scoring a combined seven first-quarter points in three games when you tallied a total of 86 points – by getting into the semantics of “what do you define as a start?” Or when you continually play the One Play Away card without ever UNO reversing it, because that would mean LSU was a couple of plays away from the Trojans being 2-3.

It’s one thing to snap at a reporter and demand a “more professional question” after he asks a player who was involved in the game’s pivotal play about said play. But it’s a way wilder thing to say: “Who cares what he says on that, what? A player’s opinion?”

There are better ways to protect your guys.

The Rams’ Sean McVay, say, is constantly throwing himself on his sword, including just 20 seconds into Sunday’s postgame news conference following a tough loss to the Green Bay Packers: “Hated that we had the substitution error that extended a drive; that’s on us as coaches, we have to be better.”

Or the Clippers’ Tyronn Lue, who’s also always trying to steal the heat, even after, say, his stars Kawhi Leonard and Paul George combined to go 0 for 9 to finish a nationally televised loss: “I got to get those guys in the right spots to make those plays.”

My bad is almost never a bad look.

Man, Miller Moss isn’t afraid to own his mistakes, including after the 27-24 heartbreaker at Michigan: “Defense played their (butt) off … we didn’t help them out much early on, so that’s on us. We gotta be better, especially me. … Obviously, I feel like I cost our team in a big way, turning the ball over. I gotta be a lot better.”

Seated beside Moss, Riley would say that he agreed after he fielded a question about play-calling as though he were under oath: “Probably more about execution than calls,” he said, turning down the blanket accountability he would offer after the 24-17 loss to Minnesota: “We’re gonna hold all three sides accountable, all the coaches, everybody, we have to be a little bit better …”

He was right about that. Every little bit helps, in every facet, on and off the field – including, when possible, scoring points postgame. It’s so often a matter of deescalating, owning up, reading the room outside of the room. As much politicking as problem-solving as knowing when to punt.

Because if you’re not winning on the field, you might want to win the press conference.