LOS ANGELES — In the fourth game of the last year of his high school football career, Garrett Riley got ejected.

There was a controversial call late in Muleshoe’s comeback attempt against Idalou, and the head official deemed that Riley, the Mules’ star quarterback, had used “vulgar language.”

Riley was confused, as was his coaching staff. Here was a clean-cut kid, a guy who would go on to win Texas’ AP offensive player of the year honor for his division, and now he was jeopardizing his team’s chances of winning a game?

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It simply didn’t add up.

Only when the smoke cleared one day later, after Muleshoe’s only loss of the regular season, did the staff find out it was actually teammate Lane Wood, the head coach’s nephew, who had wondered aloud “exactly what kind of effin’ cow manure” was going on with the officiating.

“My dad had some pretty hefty Saturday morning hard yards for ejections,” said Wes Wood, Riley’s teammate and son of head coach David Wood. “Lane did it with Garrett.”

That was about the only reining-in Wood did with Riley, who had been given unprecedented freedom to control the Mules’ offense. Prior to Riley’s junior year, Wood and his staff took a field trip an hour away to Texas Tech, where Mike Leach was running an offense called the Air Raid. One of Leach’s student assistants was another former Muleshoe quarterback named Lincoln Riley, who helped educate his old coaches on the system.

You know how the rest of the story goes when it comes to Leach and the Air Raid. And you most certainly know what became of Lincoln Riley.

But Garrett Riley, the 33-year-old Broyles Award winner? (Seven years after big brother won it.) The guy who took a written-off quarterback to a runner-up finish in this year’s Heisman Trophy voting? (Where he lost to big brother’s quarterback.) The guy who became the first Riley to make a national title game? (In big brother’s backyard.)

Yeah, that story starts in Muleshoe too. But from there it took a completely different path on its way to SoFi Stadium for college football’s grandest stage, where No. 3 TCU will play No. 1 Georgia for the national championship Monday night.

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How did TCU get to the CFP title game with a new coach and coming off a 5-7 season?

Garrett Riley played football at Texas Tech (like Lincoln did), but after two years he moved to Stephen F. Austin. There, head coach J.C. Harper had been searching for a niche to get his program off the ground after a winless debut campaign in 2008. His father, Tom, had been an assistant at Clemson in the Danny Ford era. One of Tom’s old grad assistants, Ruffin McNeill, was on the Texas Tech staff, so Harper picked his brain about the Air Raid, which had begun serving as the great equalizer at the FCS level, too.

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McNeill recommended Shannon Dawson, the offensive coordinator at Division III Millsaps in Mississippi.

“I worked for Lou Holtz at Notre Dame, and one of the things with Lou is you break things down to the lowest common denominator to make it simple,” Harper said. “When Shannon interviewed, he said you’ve got to have the capacity for boredom. And so when we went back to my office I said, ‘Tell me what you mean by that.’ And he went into more detail. I said, ‘I’m gonna pay you whatever. The bottom line is that I’m going to hold you to that. I’m going to hold you to: You’ve got to have the capacity for boredom.’ Because most coaches don’t have that. Most coaches cannot have the capacity for boredom.”

The Lumberjacks won the Southland Conference title in Dawson’s second year. Riley came aboard in Dawson’s third year, and though he played only sparingly behind starter Jeremy Moses (now an assistant at Colorado State), his impact on the room and in the system was evident, with Harper saying both players were integral in putting together the game plan each week. (SFA repeated as conference champs.)

Riley returned to Lubbock and coached at local Roosevelt High for a year before blindly applying and receiving a job to coach running backs at Division III Augustana College in Illinois, a private Lutheran school near the Iowa border. Then-quarterbacks coach Zac Connors remembers sorting through Riley’s resume and thinking the Vikings could use an Air Raid protege, even if it seemed like a square peg to the round hole of an offense that the program was running.

“Then you get to talk to him on the phone and you get to know him and it’s like the easiest conversation you’ve ever had in your life,” Connors said. “I mean, he’s just so easygoing. He’s got that deep Texas accent, and some of the phrasing and sayings that he would have would just freaking knock you off your feet with laughter. And so I remember that interview process was like, if nothing else, he’s going to bring some really cool offensive ideas, and he’s going to bring something culturally that is so far different from this Chicagoland area.”

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Connors likes to refer to Augustana’s offense as “multiple.” Riley laughed when relayed this, saying it was basically a triple-option offense.

However it was branded — for the record, the program ran for more yards (1,630) than it passed (1,495) — it was effective, as Augustana won four of its final five games to finish 5-5 after a 2-8 debut campaign under head coach Rob Cushman.

“You could tell he was going to be successful,” said Aaron Call, a part-time assistant at the school. “He pretty much wanted to cut his teeth and do it his way without too much help. I’m sure just coming from Texas Tech, I think part of it was that offense. Our head coach wanted somebody that had been around that.”

Riley and Connors bonded that year, the Texan from the Leach tree connecting with Connors, an Andy Ludwig disciple who was well-versed in West Coast offense principles. They mainly spoke about two things: vertical passing and Red Dirt country music.

Connors was a Bay Area native who was more in tune with the Seattle grunge scene and 2Pac. Riley accused him of not being cultured enough. And since words wouldn’t do the genre justice, the newcomer burned a CD for his colleague featuring hits from Whiskey Myers, the Randy Rogers Band, the Josh Abbott Band, Cross Canadian Ragweed and several country artists Connors had never heard of.

A few songs in, Connors was hooked.

“I’ll also say this: He probably helped me with my transition when I went down and coached Texas high school football,” said Connors, who’s now a private QB coach. “I was able to mesh with that staff a little bit easier because I already had developed an affinity for their music.”

On the field, the influence went beyond simple pass concepts.

Sam Frasco, then a freshman quarterback who bonded with Connors and Riley, says of the coaches’ mantra: “Just stay calm. Be in the moment. When your time is up, don’t shy away. Take full advantage of it.”

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Asked Saturday for one lesson he’s learned under Riley, Max Duggan offered a similar takeaway:

“Just the mindset of not being scared to make a play,” the TCU quarterback said. “He’s done so much and obviously schematic-wise of football, but I think the mindset of being bold and being aggressive and not being afraid to make a play is something that he’s really preached to us in the quarterback room and us as an offense, which has helped us get to this point.”

TCU OC Garrett Riley was asked who’s the best red-head Horned Frogs QB of all-time between Andy Dalton and Max Duggan.

Riley went with Duggan: “He’s my ginger.”

— Matt Fortuna (@Matt_Fortuna) January 7, 2023

Riley lasted just a year at Augustana. He joined his brother at East Carolina in 2013 and then carved his own path, coaching every offensive position except for the offensive line across stints at Kansas, Appalachian State and SMU.

David Wood gave Riley the green light during his final two years at Muleshoe, equating the philosophy to backyard football:

Trust your personnel. If you see a weakness, exploit it.

It sounds a lot like working for Sonny Dykes at TCU.

“What’s been awesome in working with him is he trusts his coaches,” Riley said. “That’s one of the ultimate things you can ask for in an assistant coach is for your head coach to truly trust you to do your job. He’s allowed us to do that. And that’s what I really appreciate about Sonny because I know that’s not how it is everywhere. That’s hard to do. But that’s what’s been great for us, to be able to have that freedom and not have to worry about that.”

Wood’s son, Wes, took that credo to heart as a player. He looked up to Lincoln, six years his elder, but befriended Garrett at vacation bible school as a pre-teen. He moved to receiver during Riley’s senior year, before succeeding him as Muleshoe’s quarterback a year later.

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It was Wes, not one of the Rileys, who led the Mules to their first state title.

“I wore No. 12, I still wear No. 12 on my necklace, and it was all because of Lincoln,” said Wes Wood, now the head coach and athletic director at Snyder High in West Texas. “It wasn’t because of Tom Brady, it was Lincoln. And to watch what he did and then (coach) the Heismans and then all of a sudden you have a year like this.

“Lincoln was so cool, right? But Garrett was like literally one of my dudes, my boys, my brothers. I mean, 15 years ago, me and that dude are sitting in my cousin’s Jeep, flying down this caliche road, going up these caliche pits. Who would’ve thought?”

Watching the Heisman ceremony on his couch last month, David Wood turned to his wife, Jody, and asked the same question.

“Going 1 and 2 in the Heisman, both winning the Broyles, what are the odds?” David says. “It’s a good feeling. You know you’ve done something worthwhile if the town of Muleshoe can produce some kids like that. It’s just pretty neat.”

(Photo: Matthew Visinsky/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)