PULLMAN – In the middle of a Zoom chat, Noah Riley almost fell out of the seat of his car.
He was chatting with Daniel Stern, then the director of football strategy for the Baltimore Ravens, who were interested in using Riley in some capacity.
On this day in 2021, Riley’s vision for breaking into the NFL orbit was beginning to come to fruition.
Stern and Riley, the brother of Washington State hoops coach David Riley, had done two previous interviews. They didn’t feel like that, Riley said – “we were just talking football,” he said – but the third proved to be the most important.
That’s because about halfway through, Ravens coach John Harbaugh popped up on the screen and offered Riley a job.
“I was very surprised,” Riley laughed. “I was not expecting that at all.”
That set into motion the world where Riley now lives. He spent four seasons with the Ravens, first as a coaching research intern before completing his last few seasons as a football analyst, working a week ahead to prepare game plans and pitch new ideas to assistant coaches. At the beginning of the calendar year, when Harbaugh was fired by the Ravens and hired as the New York Giants’ head man, he brought Riley with him, as a quality control coach.
In the post-COVID world alone, Riley has ascended the coaching ladder with remarkable speed. A Bay Area native, Riley started his collegiate football career playing quarterback at Whitworth University before transferring to Lewis and Clark College, where he graduated in 2020. Soon after, he landed a low-level job at the College of San Mateo, not far from where Noah and David grew up in Palo Alto.
Soon, Riley caught on with the Ravens, one of only two teams to see Riley’s potential. A few weeks before he began chatting with Stern, Riley identified the email address format for every NFL team’s coaching staff, then sent materials to coaches from each team: his resume and a digital copy of his book, “Breaking down the 2018 Oklahoma Offense,” which sold more than 1,000 copies across its first month of publication. Only representatives from Baltimore and Seattle responded.
This summer, Riley is enjoying a bit of freedom before his first season with the New York Giants after five years with the Ravens. It’s given Riley a chance to reflect on the wild turns his life has taken: Spokane to Portland to San Mateo to Baltimore to the Big Apple, the childlike curiosity that drives him on an everyday basis, the deep coaching ties he shares with his family, including brother David and uncle Mike Riley, the former coach at Oregon State and Nebraska.
“It was ingrained in us early, really early on,” Riley said. “I think it’s probably different than a lot of families. It wasn’t about whether you were the star on the team or the last guy off the bench. But how you competed and how you were as a teammate, that kind of stuff, it represents the family. I think there’s a really strong identity with that. Every game we go to, our whole family is showing out. That’s probably our family reunions. That’s how we get together as a family. We go watch our uncle play or my brother play or me play later on. When you’re playing, it’s a reflection of who you are and who our family is.”
Noah Riley, left, sister Hannah (Courtesy of Noah Riley)
Noah Riley, left, sister Hannah (Courtesy of Noah Riley)
“I think it’s been interesting this year with him going to a new team and building a new program with new guys,” David added. “He’s been calling me a lot about some of that stuff, and probably ended up being a bigger role this year. We try to pick each other’s brains. Me and my brother, most of our conversations are about sports. My sister tries to make sure there’s some other topics being discussed every once in a while.”
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To pitch his first play idea, Noah didn’t have to draw up something he never had before. Instead, he looked to the cover of his book, which is a play design featuring two deep post routes, a shallow route that climbs vertically and a curl route. He figured that with the speed of Ravens QB Lamar Jackson, they could pull it off.
So during one game in the 2024 season, Harbaugh gave it the green light.
“I brought that up as a quarters-beater, and we ended up getting that in a couple games, and it hit,” Riley said. “I think it had one touchdown and a couple other explosive plays, and then just different versions of that ended up being a pretty good play for us too.”
That kind of dynamic illustrates one of the main tenets of Riley’s job with the Ravens and now with the Giants: watch mountains of film on the upcoming opponent, identify tendencies and statistics that could swing the game, then meet with players on how it all could manifest in that weekend’s game. It could be grueling work – in his early days with the Ravens, he watched every play that unfolded across the NFL the previous weekend, pinpointed the top 40 he liked and presented them to Greg Roman, then Baltimore’s offensive coordinator – but he had a firm footprint in the building.
The best way to capture Riley’s job goes like this: One week, Baltimore was preparing to play the Cleveland Browns, who were known to play an aggressive, attacking style on their defensive line and in their linebacker corps. So Riley figured the Ravens could turn that against the Browns by incorporating motion, misdirection and play action into their offensive approach. During the week, Riley tracked down a key statistic on Cleveland’s defense: It surrendered about twice as many yards per rush on plays with presnap motion than plays without it.
“Because it slows their linebackers down,” Riley said. “So I kinda saw that on film and asked our stat guys to run it, and it kind of goes with the rest of the story of who they are. And then we play against them, and we’re running motion every (time). It might not be anything I pitch directly, but kind of the theme of that game was, we need to motion these guys and force them to slow down a little bit. We can’t just line up and go stagnant because they’re gonna go downhill and hit us if we do that.”
In some ways, Riley’s first NFL gig came with the right franchise. Growing up, Noah and David may have gravitated toward different sports, but they shared a similar philosophy, which centered around creativity and flow. They figured they could unlock players’ true potential by letting them be themselves, by letting them make their own decisions during games, by trying things they never had before and letting the results inform their approaches in the future.
Riley didn’t need four years in Baltimore to realize that’s the way Harbaugh likes to operate too. In fact, he realized it fairly early on in Harbaugh, who uses this phrase to color his coaching style:
“Harbs does a really good job,” Riley said, “of saying, hey, here’s our identity, here’s who we are, this is the root of it, but down to the branches of everything, it goes a lot of different ways. There’s a lot of creativity that comes from it, and we’re not just a cookie cutter team anywhere he is. What we did on defense was probably different than with Mike, and how we use Kyle Hamilton was different than anyone in the NFL. How we use guys like Pat (Ricard, fullback) is different. It’s a very flexible system, and it’s fun to be around that.”
“Philosophically, there’s actually a lot of similarities with the positionless stuff, which I don’t know where that comes from or why,” David said, referring to the wide-open style of play his Eastern Washington and WSU teams have used. “I think the elegance and simplicity is a thing that we both try to look for in the way we coach. I think there’s a statistical background that comes from our dad (Ed), being the doctor, being the smart one in the family.”
Truth be told, Riley may have gotten his professional start in Baltimore, but his real start came at home. He grew up alongside David, alongside Ed, alongside Mike, whose college experience came in handy for Noah Riley. When Mike was the head man at Oregon State, from 2003-14, he recognized Noah was obsessed with the game – Noah would draw play ideas on his middle school homework – so starting in eighth grade, he would have Noah hang around the team during spring practices to get a feel for how the game works.
Almost two decades later, that helped Riley get in the door at the NFL level, where he’s excited to have a bigger role with New York this season. Check out a few of the Giants games this fall and maybe you’ll recognize a few concepts that have a home in Eastern Washington, too.
“I think there’s just some stuff where the message might not be the same in football or basketball,” David said. “He did make fun of me. He called our team soft last year. He said, ‘a Riley team should never be soft again.’ We both agreed on that. So there’s that side of it too. But I think overall, just like the philosophical stuff.”
“David’s been the same way with some of his guys,” Noah said. “It’s like, if they don’t fit a traditional role, no one else is looking for that guy, but there’s something that he can do, and the systems can adapt to that kind of guy. You can tap into whatever their skill set is, and it might be a skill set that nobody else can tap into their system because their systems are too rigid.”
Noah Riley uses a padded baton to prod Ravens QB Lamar Jackson during a practice. (Courtesy of Noah Riley)
Noah Riley uses a padded baton to prod Ravens QB Lamar Jackson during a practice. (Courtesy of Noah Riley)