Lincoln Riley Says USC Attendance Rises Every Year. It Fell Last Season.

The announced crowd of 51,144 against San José State was USC's smallest at the Coliseum since 2018.

USC announced a crowd of 51,144 at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum for its season opener against San José State on Saturday, August 29, 2026. That's the program's smallest home crowd since late in the 2018 season, and the heat index at the stadium hit about 100, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The people who did come sat in that. Lee Feaster, whose son Boobie Feaster is a freshman receiver for the Trojans, said on Tuesday, September 1, 2026, that his wife passed out during the game and was still blistered afterward, according to the Times.

Coach Lincoln Riley spent his Tuesday podium calling the criticism of that crowd a “false narrative,” and said the loudest critics have mostly never been inside the Coliseum. My problem isn't the defensiveness — a coach defending his building is doing his job. It's that he defended it with a number anybody can check.

Riley told reporters, per the Times: “The reality is, during my years here, attendance has gone up every single year.” It hasn't. USC's average home attendance slid from 71,571 in 2024 to 67,783 in 2025, the Times reported, using its own figures.

Here's the part that turns the argument, and it turns it toward Riley: the Times also notes the 2025 home slate had fewer marquee opponents and one game drowned by rain against Iowa, and that 67,783 was still the second-best average of his four seasons. The underlying claim — a real schedule and a winning team fill this stadium — holds. Which is exactly why picking a fight over a spreadsheet was the wrong move.

USC's own statement over the weekend said the school understands what affected Saturday's attendance and thanked the fans who came. Three days later its coach said the conversation was a false narrative pushed by people who don't follow the program.

The strongest case against me is straightforward, and Riley basically made it: results fill stadiums, not scolding, and an August non-conference opener was never going to be the ticket that tested capacity. Fair. But nobody in the bleachers scheduled an August Saturday, and nobody in the bleachers set the temperature. If the fans didn't choose the window, they shouldn't be the ones asked to answer for it — and the school already conceded that in writing.

Compare the two moments the picture keeps getting compared to. The last time a Coliseum crowd was this thin was a late-October 2018 loss to Arizona State, and from 2018 through the start of 2021, under Clay Helton, USC reached 60,000 only four times, per the Times. That was a verdict on a program. This time the Trojans won the game and opened the year ranked in the Associated Press preseason poll. The photograph looked like 2018. The standings don't.

The cost isn't ticket revenue. It's that by Monday the joke had moved from social media to other coaches' microphones — Texas Tech's Joey McGuire in Lubbock and California's Tosh Lupoi in Berkeley both took swings, the Times reported. Rival coaches say those things in front of recruits' parents. That's the bill for a heat-wave Saturday, and no ticket office can pay it down.

USC plays Fresno State at the Coliseum at 6 p.m. on Friday, September 4, in what the Times expects to be milder weather. The announced number will be public about two hours after kickoff, and it will settle this better than anybody's press conference did.

Source: latimes.com, retrieved September 2, 2026.