Head Coach Lincoln Riley can no longer hit the snooze button.

This is the wake-up call. The alarm. The Sunday Scaries.

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Whatever you want to call it, USC (7-5, 5-4 Pac-12) lost to UCLA (7-4, 4-4) 38-20 at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum Saturday afternoon.

“We just flat out didn’t play good enough,” Riley said at the postgame press conference. “Extremely disappointing to finish this way with obviously how well we started the season. I know our guys are disappointed, coaches are disappointed, I’m disappointed, our fans are disappointed — and they should be.”

The Trojans have lost three straight, five of their last six and both of their rivalry games this season. Riley and USC had an amazing turnaround from 2021 to 2022 — going from 4-8 to 11-3 — but the Trojans found out this year exactly how tough consistently winning can be.

USC may have been lucky last year in certain games — like when then-sophomore defensive lineman Korey Foreman intercepted a pass to clinch the win in the 2022 edition of the Crosstown Showdown — but that luck has seemingly run out this season.

“You go change three plays this year, and we’ve probably won three more games,” Riley said.

But, unfortunately for fans, this may have been what the Trojans needed.

If USC had kept winning, Riley would not be forced to fix the obvious and glaring problems surrounding the Trojans. Former defensive coordinator Alex Grinch might’ve still had his job if the Trojans and Riley hadn’t had to fix an offense that committed three turnovers against the Bruins.

Because, at the end of the day, a win is a win regardless of the score.

But now, the Trojans are not winning, and Riley cannot keep looking at this team through rose-colored glasses. Even after the game, Riley seemed to think that if not for the embarrassing loss, he would not make many more major changes past the firing of Grinch.

“You may lose a close one here and there, where it’s just right there; one play here or there,” Riley said. “This season probably came down to four or five plays we didn’t make.”

USC has lost three games this season where it had a single-digit deficit at some point in the last three minutes of the fourth quarter. But the Trojans have now lost two games in embarrassing fashion — the other against Notre Dame (8-3), another rivalry game — and that can not be chalked up to three to four plays going awry for USC.

“The game feels very similar to Notre Dame: missed opportunities, obviously a ton of turnovers offensively — the turnovers and the fourth down stops,” Riley said. “We had two games like this one today where … [we] really didn’t give ourselves a chance to win.”

The silver lining here is that USC was truly only a few plays away from beating Washington (11-0, 8-0), Utah (7-4, 4-4) and even Oregon (10-1, 7-1), all three of which were ranked when the Trojans played them.

“Those are plays that you gotta get fixed,” said junior safety Jaylin Smith in the postgame press conference. “You can’t continue to let that happen … And Coach [Riley] talks about it week in and week out. We gotta try to find a way to stop it.”

UCLA was USC’s first non-ranked loss in the Riley era, which, on the surface, seems like a good thing. And it should be taken as a good thing. It means the Trojans have beat the teams they were supposed to beat and now they just have to take the next step to beat the best teams in the country.

This loss will sting for Trojan fans up until USC can return the Victory Bell back to the protection of the Trojan Knights — and it should sting. But on the other side of this, it showed what could have happened if USC had won the game: a holding pattern.

There were reports that UCLA’s Head Coach Chip Kelly could be fired if he lost against USC for the second year in a row. The Bruin win could have saved Kelly’s job, at least for the time being. UCLA will now remain with the same coach who has a 34-33 record since 2018.

But this loss forces Riley’s and USC’s hands. They have to make changes because, obviously, the current system in place is not working. For the Bruins, they have four losses, but they just beat their rival by three possessions, which is no easy feat. Their system is working, at least in part. Comparatively, the Trojans have lost to their two main rivals by a combined 46 points this season.

“We are going to be great,” Riley said. “It sucks right now, it hurts right now. But I’ve never been more motivated and have more of a fire in my belly than I do right now.”

Now it’s on Riley to channel that motivation and make some changes. The Trojans should not lose when they have more total yards and 229 more passing yards than their opponent. Nor should they allow their opponent to convert on 65% of their third-down tries. Or have two major special teams mistakes: missing a chip-shot field goal and committing a penalty that put USC deep in its own territory that led to a scoop-and-score touchdown for the Bruins one play into the drive.

The alarm bells are ringing, even if the Victory Bell won’t be on campus anymore. And if Riley doesn’t wake up and make some changes, he might be left behind.

The Trojans will have to wait nearly a month until they play in their soon-to-be-announced bowl game, a game they have been eligible for since Oct. 7 despite ending the regular season only one win above the bowl-eligibility threshold.