USC Scored 7, Rushed for Minus-17, and Jumped Around With Wisconsin While Losing — Then USC’s Brass Were Reported Ready to Welcome Lincoln Riley’s Move to Baylor.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2026

Let’s rewind the tape to Saturday night in Madison, because there are losses, there are embarrassing losses, and then there is whatever happened to USC at Camp Randall Stadium — a night so complete in its collapse that it needed a second day to finish falling apart. On Saturday, the Trojans scored the fewest points of Lincoln Riley’s head-coaching career, ran the football for a negative number, and joined the home team’s celebration while losing. On Sunday, a report landed that USC’s own brass would welcome their $100-million coach leaving for Baylor. The game was the statement. The leak was the signature.

Seven points, and a run game that went backwards

Start with the arithmetic, because the arithmetic does not need any help being funny. Wisconsin beat USC 24–7, and the seven was not a slow night — it was a historic one: the fewest points a Riley-coached team has ever scored, per USA Today, and the 17-point margin was the largest defeat a ranked Riley team has ever taken from an unranked opponent. USC led 7–3 in the second quarter. It never scored again.

The ground game finished at 25 carries for minus-17 yards. Read that again and take your time. A programme with USC’s recruiting classes ran the ball twenty-five times and ended the night seventeen yards behind where it started. The biggest single author of that number was the pass rush: Jayden Maiava was sacked five times for minus-57 yards. Maiava still did real work through the air — 31-of-58 for 258 yards and the Trojans’ only touchdown — but he also threw two interceptions in the first quarter, the first time he has thrown two in a game all season, and the mistakes set the table Wisconsin ate off of all night.

The kicking game brought its own dish to the potluck. In the third quarter, a 44-yard field-goal attempt got a hand on it — Wisconsin’s Junior Poyser, per Sports Illustrated’s recap — with the score 17–7. In the fourth, a delay-of-game penalty pushed the next attempt back to 58 yards, and it came up short. Two missed field goals, at least six points left on the field, in a game the Trojans lost by 17. And across the line, Luke Fickell’s Wisconsin Badgers played the whole game in one gear: 43 rushes for 142 yards and two scores, with quarterback Colton Joseph an efficient 12-of-14 for 58 yards and a touchdown — a screen to Chris Brooks Jr. in the third quarter that made it 17–7 — before Ryan Schwendeman’s one-yard dive with about five minutes left closed the book at 24–7. USC, which had not visited Camp Randall since 1965, is now 4–9 under Riley in the Central and Eastern time zones. NBC’s postgame crew called it the biggest win of Fickell’s Wisconsin tenure. Somebody’s programme had a night. It just wasn’t the one that flew in ranked.

Then came “Jump Around”

And now the moment this segment exists for. Camp Randall’s “Jump Around” is one of the great traditions in the sport: between the third and fourth quarters, House of Pain comes over the speakers and the entire stadium — students, alumni, the press box, reportedly the structure itself — leaves the ground. It is the home crowd’s party, thrown in the visitors’ faces, and on Saturday night, with Wisconsin up 17–7 and one quarter from the upset, the party started. And several USC players joined in.

That is not an interpretation; it is the record. USA Today reported that several Trojans could be seen participating in the tradition while trailing by ten, and was generous about the possible motives: maybe they were trying to drum up energy, maybe they were showing the crowd they would not be intimidated. Here is the context that makes generosity hard to sustain. USC spent the week practising with “Jump Around” blasting over its own speakers — the programme’s crowd-noise simulator, the same preparation it used for Penn State’s White Out. Safety Alex Graham told reporters he actually likes the song: “I really be jumping on the sideline when I’m in a game. Jump around, literally.” Freshman Luke Wafle explained the theory out loud: “Home teams play or do certain rituals to affect the away team, but when you use their ritual it becomes a non-factor.”

There it is, in the open, before the game: the plan was to use the ritual. Neutralise it by joining it. And a plan like that has exactly one condition attached — you have to be in the game when you do it. Down 17–7 with one touchdown all night and a run game at minus-17, there is no version of events where bouncing along to the home team’s song reads as defiance. It reads as attendance. Wisconsin’s fans spent the rest of the night celebrating an upset; some of them, per the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, carried the party all the way to American Family Field, where Brewers fans joined a “Jump Around” of their own during Game 2 of the World Series. The whole state was jumping. At least in Milwaukee, everybody doing it was winning.

The coach’s own verdict, delivered Saturday

To Riley’s credit — and this desk keeps the credit on the record, because the record is the whole show — he did not hide behind the officiating, the travel or the noise. “Just flat-out didn’t play good enough on any of the three sides of the ball,” he said in his postgame news conference. “Didn’t coach good enough. Made critical errors on the road against a good football team that you can’t make. We had our opportunities. … But you did the things that you can’t do on the road.”

That is a coach putting his own name first on the bill, and it deserves to be printed in full, because of what happened next. USA Today’s other account of the weekend opened with a sentence that has been five years in the mail: Lincoln Riley has reached the end of his USC leash. The column walked the pattern — the annual Big Ten road loss to a team USC should beat, the escape against Rutgers, another loss to Oregon, a home win over Washington so poor the student section chanted for the coach to be fired, a whiteout escape against a bad Penn State team — and noted that the 6–2 Trojans have not beaten anything close to a ranked team all season. The column was opinion. What arrived Sunday evening was not.

Sunday: the poll dropped, and then the building talked

The Coaches Poll went first. USC fell ten spots to No. 25, hanging onto a ranking by 14 votes over the next team out. Across town, UCLA climbed to No. 7 at 7–0 — the Bruins’ highest ranking since the 2014 preseason and their best start since 2005 — and received a first-place vote. The two programmes meet on Nov. 28, and the poll piece wrote the sentence itself: three months ago, nobody would have believed the Bruin would be the one pushing for the Playoff while Riley fights for his job.

Then, at 7:11 p.m. Eastern on Sunday, the second act landed. ClutchPoints relayed Bruce Feldman of The Athletic on the coaching carousel that opened when Baylor fired Dave Aranda: Riley, Feldman wrote, is “the biggest wild card” of the cycle, and if the Texas native were intrigued by the Baylor job, the welcome would run in a direction coaches do not usually get welcomed. Feldman, in full: “The 43-year-old has a sterling reputation as an offensive coach and for working with QBs. But his five-year run at USC has been so underwhelming, it’s worth asking if he’d like to re-shuffle the deck. We’re pretty confident USC brass would welcome a move like this if Riley is intrigued, especially after the Trojans got mauled this weekend at Wisconsin, where his team was held to minus 17 rushing yards and seven points — fewest ever by a Riley-coached team.”

Understand what that paragraph is. It is not a fan board. It is not a hot-seat listicle. It is one of the most connected reporters in the sport writing, on the record and in the conditional tense that sourcing requires, that the institution’s own leadership would not stand in the doorway. Feldman priced the problem, too: Riley’s buyout sits somewhere around $70 million, which is precisely why a voluntary exit is the only clean door — and why a report that the building would welcome him walking through it is the loudest sound in Los Angeles football this week. The road ahead offers no soft landing: Ohio State next, then defending national champion Indiana, a Maryland team even sympathetic accounts call dreadful, and UCLA to finish. Feldman’s arithmetic for survival was three wins in the final four.

Fair’s fair — and the target stays where it belongs

So the record gets its fairness paragraph, because this desk punches up and punches accurately. The players who jumped are not the story’s villains, and Maiava is not its punchline: a quarterback who throws for 258 yards and his team’s only touchdown while being sacked five times has done a night’s work, whatever the scoreboard says about the operation around him. The programme’s own players said the quiet part before the game — the ritual-joining was a theory somebody upstairs let them carry into a stadium where the theory required a lead they never had. The donkey here wears a headset and a contract, and the institution that leaked its own openness to his departure wears the second headset. Riley himself supplied the standard on Saturday night: didn’t play good enough, didn’t coach good enough. By Sunday, his own building had supplied the sequel.

USC is 6–2. The season is not over, the schedule still contains the exact games that could rewrite the story, and a win over Ohio State would change every sentence written this weekend except the ones already in the record. That is what makes the record worth keeping. File this one in The Rewind collection, next to every other programme that discovered the difference between preparing for a party and being invited to it.

THE VERDICT — After review: USC didn’t just lose in Madison — it auditioned for somebody else’s celebration, and by Sunday its own brass were reported to be holding the door.