'How can a West Texas boy go to L.A.?' Lincoln Riley's journey from Muleshoe to USC

Deep on the dusty plains of West Texas, where grain silos line the sparse landscape and a dry breeze blows loose tufts of cotton across U.S. Route 84, a stretch of railroad runs along a lonely highway. The Pecos and Northern Texas Railway companies laid the track here in 1913, cutting through this swath of Bailey County ranchland to connect the growing town of Lubbock to the border of New Mexico. A farming community sprouted alongside the track soon after — some 70 miles northwest of Lubbock and 30 miles east of the border — taking its name from the nearby ranch where, legend has it, the original owner found a stray muleshoe lying in the soil.

The rapid rise of Lincoln Riley, from small-town quarterback to one of the most promising football minds in America, is rooted deep in this arid soil. Ask anyone in Muleshoe about Lincoln, whose first name is enough around these parts, and they swell with pride. Lincoln, they'll tell you, could've been anything. A rocket scientist. A doctor. Maybe even an astronaut. But he chose football, and his immediate success — with three College Football Playoff semifinal appearances in his first three years as head coach at Oklahoma — has become an inextricable part of the town's story, one they're more than happy to share, even if most can't quite reckon with the latest twist.

Here in Muleshoe, the stunning news of Riley's sudden departure to USC late last month was greeted mostly with sideways glances. Few believed it at first. Oklahoma might've tested their allegiances as Texans, but Norman was still the Great Plains. Los