USC A.D. Jennifer Cohen on Lincoln Riley's 'disappointing' season, NIL and helping the Trojans win
LOS ANGELES — The holiday weekend traffic on Interstate 5 had slowed to a crawl, the thrush of cars inching toward SeaTac airport moving at a painfully slow pace. Jennifer Cohen was already beyond antsy. She hadn't seen her youngest son, Dylan, since before she became USC's newest athletic director. Their last visit was in early August, almost four months earlier, when Cohen found herself balancing Washington's impending move to the Big Ten with moving Dylan into his Montana dorm room.
But Montana, where Dylan is a freshman offensive lineman, had a first-round bye in the FCS playoffs last week, while USC had an unusually late bye baked into its football schedule. So Dylan flew west from Missoula, and Cohen flew north from L.A. to spend a rare few days in Seattle with her boys — her first real respite since taking the reins at USC in late August.
As Cohen and her ex-husband inched toward the terminal to pick Dylan up, Cohen considered jumping out of the moving car to run the rest of the way. She pictured the whole scene playing out in slow motion.
Her son leaving for college had, for Cohen, been an especially formative moment. At 54, both her boys — Dylan and older brother Tyson — were on their own. That meant coming home to an empty house, and the enormity of that realization hit her pretty hard last summer. Hard enough, at least, to consider leaving the place she'd spent nearly half of her life.
"You never really are told by people that, like, 'Hey, this is a pretty traumatic change in your life,' " Cohen said this week. "When you become an empty nester and you see your kids go and move on and change the way that they rely on you and just the structure of that, like, you just don't know what that's going to feel like to have that
