​Jul. 18—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. Tha