Lincoln Riley said he still believes there’s a lot left on the table for USC this season following a 34-32 home loss to Utah.

But a spot in the College Football Playoff is almost certainly not in USC’s future, not after a second loss in as many weeks. No two-loss team has ever made the CFP. USC could still make it to the Pac-12 title game, but it won’t play for a national title in Riley’s second year.

In July of 2022, Riley told reporters he and his staff didn’t leave Oklahoma “to play for second.” He said the expectation was to win a championship.

He had a different kind of message following the loss to the Utes when asked if a second loss would force the Trojans to reframe how they view this season.

“We’re in the middle of the season. That’s a dream world,” Riley said. “We don’t come in every single week talking about winning a national championship, going to the Playoffs. I don’t know where that narrative starts. You come in every single week trying to fight your tail off to go play well and win a ball game.

“We’ve won a helluva lot more here than we’ve lost. Are we satisfied at all sitting here at 6-2? Of course we’re not. As much as it hurts anybody on the outside, I promise you it hurts us 10 times more. But, just having been in this a little while, when you get too focused on the outside things — which I think at times our team has been — then a lot of times you miss an opportunity right in front of you. That’s what’s so important for us to see right now.

USC won 11 games in Year 1 under Riley. A roster remade through the transfer portal was designed to win right away. Caleb Williams won the Heisman Trophy as the sport’s most outstanding player and then returned for this season with a reloaded stock of weapons.

The Trojans added one of the Pac-12’s best receivers last season, a former All-Big 12 linebacker, a couple of former 5-star defensive linemen from the SEC, and then plugged holes on the offensive line with experienced veterans.

Riley said Saturday night that USC overachieved in Year 1, and it wasn’t ready to take the step to being a national title contender.

“If you let the outside set expectations, you’re always being measured up against that,” Riley said. “Last year, Year 1, expectations were kind of all over the place. We come in and probably by and large overachieve in a lot of ways. I think (it’s) fair to say the team last year probably did overachieve.

“Year 2, this is a different step. Everybody expects you to be good. Everybody expects you to have a championship-caliber team. When you’re constantly trying to live up to those expectations, you can fall away from what put you there in that position in the first place. You can let disappointment of not playing perfect, or when you won by 20 and you didn’t win by 40 and all the outside noise that comes with that, it can get to you. And I think at times (it’s) fair to say it got to this team.

USC, Riley said, has had to fight to keep things on its own terms.

Riley said the Trojans are trying to get somewhere they haven’t been in years, and he asked for patience.

“When you haven’t been in this position in a while, it takes time,” Riley said. “It’s gonna take some scars. It’s gonna take some tough lessons to learn. These are lessons that we couldn’t learn last year. It wasn’t like this. It didn’t feel like this. This is part of our progression.”