Clay Helton is content in shadows — but he has to get USC in spotlight

Clay Helton is entering his seventh season at USC, and you will find Bowling Green in the SEC before you find a college football smart guy who thought that sentence ever would be typed.

Helton is the self-effacing, self-assured, self-described servant leader who occupies the most prominent college coaching job west of the central time zone. He has been good (45-23, one Pac-12 championship) in a job that demands great. Helton wins Pac-12 South titles (three) for a fan base that expects national championships. He is a coach who shuns spotlights in a city that lives in their glow.

And as of a month ago, the pressure on Helton increased twelve-fold. With the SEC executing the perfect flex by taking Texas and Oklahoma, it’s more important than ever for the Pac-12 to end its College Football Playoff drought. It’s been five years since the Pac-12 last qualified for the playoff. Five years, as in the Obama administration. Five years, as in the virus we worried about was Zika. Five years.

The Pac-12 needs USC, ranked 15th in the preseason AP poll, to win now. The Pac-12 needs USC in the spotlight. College football needs USC in the spotlight. Remember what it felt like in the last decade, when the Trojans owned college football? They owned all of Los Angeles, too. Matt Leinart and Reggie Bush became A-listers. Movie stars and music icons alike flocked to the Trojan sideline, all invited by coach Pete Carroll, who became the highest-profile coach in a pro town.

That’s what USC football is when it’s humming. That’s what USC wants and the Pac-12 desperately needs now: Big wins, bigger glamor. And there’s the central dilemma — Helton doesn’t want a high profile. Doesn’t need it. In a job where the most successful coaches have had personalities that fill a room and bulge out the door, can Helton slip in and out and take USC where it needs to go?

“We have a responsibility as one of the upper-level teams,” Helton said last month at the Pac-12 Media Day. “I’ve always felt if we’re successful, our conference is successful.”

History tells us that when USC football is at its best, its coaches have basked in the spotlight. The Trojans have been inextricably connected to the movie industry from the earliest days of the talkies.

In 1931, MGM filmed the USC at Notre Dame game, the first between the new rivals since Knute Rockne died in a plane crash eight months earlier. USC won 16-14, scoring all its points in the fourth quarter. MGM showed the film at Loew’s State Theater in downtown Los Angeles, where it broke box-office records.

Howard Jones, the coach of that USC team, may have been a taciturn man whose mind rarely strayed from the sport, but he had a publicity director who understood the value of connecting to movie stars. That’s how Jones came to “author” a book, “Football for the Fan,” in which he answered football questions from Hollywood royalty such as Gary Cooper, Mary Pickford and the broader half of Laurel and Hardy.

Oliver Hardy: “Is the quarterback’s value today greater than it used to be?”

Jones: “Yes, because the introduction of the forward pass broadened the field for the employment of strategy.”

Riveting stuff, but the connection is the point.

As John McKay won three national championships at USC in the 1960s and 1970s, Gregory Peck might roam the sideline and John Wayne, a former Trojans lineman, might take a road trip with the team. McKay, a good-looking man with a saber of a wit, courted the writers. They painted a portrait of a bon vivant who always had a one-liner at the ready. After practice, McKay would hold court with the USC beat guys at Julie’s, a bar near campus.

“He could hold his liquor,” Steve Bisheff, the longtime columnist for the Orange County Register, once told me. “When McKay got up from the table, we would all be under it.”

A generation later, Carroll made USC football the most exciting event in Los Angeles that didn’t include Kobe Bryant. Atticus Finch and the Duke may not have been on Carroll’s sideline, but Fifty Cent, Snoop Dogg and Will Ferrell were.

After the Reggie Bush scandal put USC in NCAA jail, the university responded by banning practically everyone from the sideline who wasn’t wearing a cardinal-and-gold jersey. The Trojans’ fortunes took a dip — one Pac-12 title in the past 12 seasons — just as the Dodgers returned to greatness, the Lakers returned to greatness, the Clippers returned to relevance and the NFL returned to Los Angeles.

Helton has brought to USC a high dose of stability, a quality that eluded his predecessors, Lane Kiffin and Steve Sarkisian. Helton is a southerner more interested in his faith and his fishing rod than being a celebrity. He wants his players to garner attention. He’s fine without it. In his remarks at Pac-12 Media Day, Helton used the words “thank,” “thanks” or “thankful” 11 times. You could fit his ego in a fly box.

History tells us that’s not how USC football works. The stage is more crowded now. The Trojans are competing with LeBron, and Kawhi, and Shohei Ohtani and Clayton Kershaw and Emma Stone and Timothée Chalamet and the Pacific Ocean and Venice Beach and every other thing that keeps the multitudes coming to the 213.

USC, the Pac-12 and college football are better off when USC football lives behind the velvet ropes. Helton is trying to return the Trojans to the spotlight while staying out of it himself. That’s a move worthy of Reggie Bush. All that’s depending on it is the future of the Pacific-12 Conference.