Former player Ronnie Perkins trashes USC coordinator Alex Grinch following Pac-12 title game
If the Pac-12 Championship loss wasn’t bad enough, one of USC defensive coordinator Alex Grinch’s former players, Ronnie Perkins (Oklahoma), added insult to injury with a major burn on his former coach.
Amid the struggles that led to USC’s 47-24 loss to Utah, one reporter asked what Alex Grinch does all week. Perkins responded, likely from personal experience.
“Trash players to draft scouts,” Perkins said.
Perkins, an EDGE for the New England Patriots, was a third-rounder (No. 96 overall) out of Oklahoma in 2021. He was a former four-star recruit and top-100 player in the 2018 class, per the On3 Consensus, and all things considered, Perkins has a fairly successful career in three seasons with the Sooners notching 16.5 sacks and 32 tackles for loss over his tenure.
It isn’t likely for Perkins, who is only wrapping up his second season in the NFL, to just say this with no facts to back it up. To his point, it seems counterproductive for a coach to “trash” his players turning pro. The higher his players get drafted, the better for him, right?
Still, Perkins has been vocal about his former college coaches in the past, and it doesn’t seem those bridges have been burnt. He even commented on USC head coach Lincoln Riley’s abrupt departure to Southern California when it happened.
“As much as [Lincoln Riley] has done for me as a person/player, I’ll never talk a bad about him but [there] was definitely a better way to handle this whole situation,” Perkins wrote on Twitter at the time.
Riley was one of Perkins biggest supporters when the former OU EDGE was suspended for six games for failing a drug test ahead of the 2019 Peach Bowl. The suspension carried over halfway through the following season, but in his return, Perkins was able to help transform Grinch’s defense, leading to his eventual top-100 draft selection that following April.
It’s not likely Perkins and Grinch will be sitting down together anytime sooner for dinner, but the two played pivotal roles in the success of Oklahoma during their tenures – a fact that both men can likely agree upon.