Lincoln Riley used to produce Heisman Trophy winners. Now he produces Ray Guy Award winners.

How many coaches have gone from a Heisman winner to a Ray Guy winner being the best player on the team in the span of two seasons?

• USC received a commitment from its first transfer, Central Florida cornerback Chasen Johnson.
• Carson Palmer has been named football coach at his alma mater, Santa Margarita. His son, Fletch, is currently a freshman quarterback at the school.

• Jedd the Fisch cannot be happy with the Big Ten. Five of Washington’s first six Big Ten opponents will be coming off bye weeks.

• And now for some history:

• “I love the Coliseum. The Rams will always play there,” Los Angeles Rams owner Dan Reeves said in 1954. “At first I was very dubious about the Coliseum. Now I think it’s just the thing for pro football in L.A.

“I wish they could put a double deck on the Coliseum. Then we could add to the seats between the goal lines. You have no idea how much that would help.”

Did you know there were renderings of the Coliseum during its most-recent 2018 renovation that included double-decker seating? But they were rejected by USC.

Reeves moved the Rams from Cleveland to Los Angles in 1946 and owned the team until his death in 1971.

• A couple weeks ago, I showed a wonderful illustration by Bill Griffin of a high school player of the week from the old Los Angeles Daily News, which existed from 1923-54.

So I randomly found another one and it ended up having a backstory I never anticipated.

Above is Hollywood High School basketball player Alan Ludecke, who helped lead the Sheiks to three Western League titles in the early 1950’s.

The name rang a bell and it turned out I had written his name before. He was a member of the 1954 USC basketball team that went to the Final Four, the last Trojan team to make it to the Final Four.

• Here’s a 1954 photo of USC players Roy Irvin, Ludecke (center) and Walter Thompson leaving the Hotel Continental in Kansas City before a Final Four game against Penn State. The Trojans lost to Bradley, 74-72, in a semifinal game and then lost to Penn State, 70-61, in the third-place game.

In 2014, Ludecke attended the USC-Oregon game at the Galen Center with other surviving members of the 1954 team on their 60th anniversary.

• The Los Angeles Daily News, which folded in 1954, looked like an amazing paper that actually cared about the city it covered, unlike the L.A. Times.

It was a tabloid; had prep coverage and showed faces that I doubt the Times ever did during that period. A Saturday paper would include 20 high school football games with recaps from correspondents at the games.

It is believed to be the first paper to employ women as journalists and sports writer Lupi Saldana might have been the first Hispanic sports writer in Los Angeles.

• Here is a random photo of Manual Arts High School fullback Earnel Darden ripping a 10-yard run before getting tackled by Carl Ketchie of San Fernando High School in 1954.

I knew nothing about the photo beforehand but . . . Manual Arts won the L.A. City Section Division I championship that season. Darden then went to Oregon State and was a member of the 1956 team that won the Pacific Coast Conference and played in the 1957 Rose Bowl. He was going to go to UCLA but Bruins assistant Tommy Prothro was hired as head coach at Oregon State and got him to change his mind.

He later became an assistant coach with UCLA, Los Angeles Rams, Houston Oilers and San Diego Chargers. He is believed to be the first African-American assistant coach at UCLA and the Rams.

• USC star tailback Jon Arnett, who attended Manual Arts like Darden, tried to get him to play for the Trojans.

“Jon played at my high school and he left a year or two before I got there and he came back and he said, ‘We really want you over at SC and things are not the way they used to be (with African-Americans).’ I said, Jon, `I’m not going to SC.’ I said, ‘You are wasting your time, no disrespect to you.’ Jon was a good guy.”

Durden said African-American players did not look favorably at USC in those days. USC did not have an African-American player from 1927-51.

“There was a young black athlete who was from same area who was recruited very heavily by a lot of schools, including some of the schools back in the Big Ten, but chose SC and after he was there for a couple years he went in to ask the coach why he wasn’t playing.

“He said, ‘I know I’m better than those guys you got playing for you, so why am I not playing?’ And the coach says, ‘Oh, you know we didn’t bring you here to play, we brought you here so you wouldn’t play against us.’ “

• Note this wrestling card from the Olympic Auditorium in 1951. At the bottom is Woody Strode, who played football at UCLA and was better known as an actor in films like “Spartacus” and “Sergeant Rutledge.”
• When I ran the video of the 1981 USC-UCLA game last month, I mentioned wide receiver Timmy White threw a beautiful 48-yard pass to wide receiver Jeff Simmons in that game.

It reminded me of my favorite White story. He went to Asbury Park High School in New Jersey.

“I’ve played the drums since I was about four years old,” White said in the USC media guide, “and started playing in groups in grammar school. I was hoping to major in music at USC, but the class schedules prevented me from doing that and playing football.”

When White was kid, he played with a New Jersey musician you might have heard of named Bruce Springsteen.

“He used to practice in a cellar and we would go down and play on the instruments,” White said. “Sometimes he would come down and play with us.”