Musings from Arledge: History of the World (Or Recent USC Football) Part 2

Somebody on the WeAreSC message boards asked for an analysis or history of how we got to where we are today with USC football. It sounded like a worthwhile offseason project, so I decided to take up the challenge. 

In case you missed Part 1, you can catch up here. Now, where were we? Oh, right…

Pat Haden fired Lane Kiffin. He had to. But I still contend that the decision to hire Kiffin was not crazy. It was a well-calculated decision that ultimately failed.

It was the next, completely inexcusable hire that started USC football down its lengthy death spiral. From this point on, USC fans wandered the streets aimlessly like the depressed and pathetic Ron Burgundy wandering the streets of San Diego with a carton of warm milk, screaming “Sark was a bad choice!”  

III. The Steve Sarkisian Years 

I want you to put yourself in Pat Haden’s shoes. You replace Lane Kiffin with Ed Orgeron, and the attitude of the entire program changes. No, the team doesn’t dominate the rest of the way. But it at least plays with heart. It wins a fantastic gut-check game against a tough Stanford team at the Coliseum despite having only about 13 guys that you can put on the field defensively. And the players love O. I mean, love him. He gave them cookies, and he wasn’t Lane Kiffin. That may have been enough right there. 

But, still, Pat didn’t think he was the guy. Some say Pat and the administration didn’t see Ed O as the guy to glad hand with the rich boosters. Maybe. Or maybe Pat wasn’t sold because Ed O had a terrible run at Ole Miss. Hiring a coach who has already failed as a head coach is the very mistake USC made with Paul Hackett. That’s certainly a red flag. 

USC fans are, of course, torn to this day on whether Haden should have given Ed O the job permanently. I think Haden was right not to hire Ed O. The players loved him, but that’s never a sufficient reason to hire a coach. And Ed’s failure at Ole Miss was troublesome. There were also always rumors of ethical concerns swirling around Ed, fair or not. And while he later had a magical, national-title winning year at LSU, he also won only 62% of his games there during his other four seasons there, and he closed with two very disappointing seasons. 

I don’t fault Pat Haden for passing on Ed O. I think it was probably the right move. I’m not sure he delivered that decision well – based only on rumors I’ve heard – but those are only rumors, and those rumors concern procedure rather than substance. Passing on Ed O was reasonable.

What wasn’t reasonable is what hollowed. What followed made running the Titanic through icy waters at full speed seem wise. George Orwell described a totalitarian future as “a boot stamping on a human face – forever.” Pat Haden’s next move was USC finding a way to stamp on its own face with a boot forever. At least it felt like forever. And like a boot. Or maybe a stiletto heel.  

What must Pat Haden have been thinking? Okay, Lane Kiffin was a disaster. We tried to recreate the Pete Carroll magic, but he was just too young and immature, and the experiment failed in spectacular fashion on an airport tarmac. So, let’s see, for a replacement … who’s the absolute closest thing we can find to Lane Kiffin? 

It’s not like Sarkisian was killing it at Washington. Sark was, and is, an excellent recruiter, a good quarterbacks coach, and a capable offensive coordinator. Again, you don’t get hired by Pete Carroll and Nick Saban to run an offense if you’re stupid. But he earned the moniker “Seven-Win Sark” for a reason, because after helping Washington to achieve mediocrity after the Tyrone Willingham face plant, Sark then kept Washington mediocre, a barely-above-.500 program for five years. Here are Sark’s Pac-12 records at Washington: 4-5, 5-4, 5-4, 5-4, 5-4. And his teams continually looked soft and undisciplined, nothing like his mentor, Pete Carroll’s. He was even rumored to be on the hot seat at Washington, and that’s not surprising, since it is possible to win at Washington, which isn’t a bottom-feeder program. You can’t expect the Huskies to put up with utter mediocrity forever. So USC stepped in to rescue Washington and self-sanction the USC program.

That’s the guy for USC? Really, Pat?

Haden thought so, apparently on the advice of Pete Carroll. And in choosing Sark, Pat Haden appears to have passed over a real football coach: Chris Petersen. And this is where things really get ugly. We’ll never know if Chris Petersen would have accepted the USC job. I suspect he would have had he felt better about working for Pat Haden. He was interviewing for a reason, and he was clearly ready to take on a bigger job. But who knows. Maybe only Chris Petersen truly knows. 

What I do know is that USC fans got the double whammy. The media was reporting that Chris Petersen was interviewing for the USC job – which would have been a fantastic hire; Petersen may not be Nick Saban, but he’s the next level down and was a legitimate top-10 head coach. And almost immediately after getting our hopes up, the news breaks that the job is going to Sark instead. USC ruined its chance to become elite again. And it dramatically improved a conference rival all at once.

I wanted to cry. Or scream. Or put Haden in my trunk and bury him in the desert. This was athletic director malpractice of the first order. It was obvious – obvious! – that Sark would fail at USC. It was equally obvious that Chris Petersen would have succeeded, maybe not like Carroll, but he would have fielded quality football teams consistently.

And note that I haven’t said anything about substance abuse. I suspect Sark’s drinking would have been discovered in a real due-diligence process. But you didn’t have to know about alcohol abuse to know that this was a terrible hire. If you didn’t want a young, unprepared Pete Carroll assistant when you fired Kiffin, why do you want a young, unprepared Pete Carroll assistant when you replaced him?

This isn’t 20/20 hindsight. This was predictable at the time; indeed, I did predict it at the time. Here is my assessment on the WeAreSC board in 2013 when Sark was hired: “Terrible hire. Sark is not a terrible coach; he’s a mediocre coach. We’re looking at 8-4 seasons as far as the eye can see. Beat the bad teams; lose to the good teams. Every year he’ll be fighting to do just enough to stay off the hot seat. Haden had a chance to make USC nationally relevant again, and he blew it.”

I was wrong, of course. Not about Sark being mediocre and a terrible hire. I nailed that. But about his longevity. I didn’t know he would show up drunk and get fired for cause. That was a lucky break for USC – you know, if Haden had chosen to seize it. 

He didn’t. Haden took the golden opportunity offered to him to correct his egregious mistake in hiring Sark and he threw it in the urinal. (Does that analogy even work?) It was like almost Pat was admiring the Grand Canyon, slipped on loose footing and almost plunged to his death, and then immediately walked back to the ledge to take an even closer look. It was astronomically stupid. Pat Haden’s second hire would help cement his place as the Michael Jordan of Terrible Athletic Directors. 

But I’m getting too far ahead. We can’t go there just yet. 

I don’t want to go through all the gory details of Sark’s brief tenure. But can we highlight just how strange it was? Stranger even than the Lane Years, if that’s believable. You had the early big win against Stanford. (We’ll come back to that one. Lots of stuff there.) Then the absolute manhandling the following week when Boston College ran for 452 yards (!) against USC. And if you’ve forgotten, that BC team was not 1993 Nebraska; it finished 7-6 and lost to Colorado State. Then only a couple of weeks after BC was the disastrous loss to ASU on a Hail Mary, something the USC defense had apparently never seen before. USC had a linebacker trying to defend that pass 50 yards downfield. And, of course they did; why have a safety or tall wide receiver back there? ASU might have run a dive play. And, as you might expect from a poor middle linebacker, he pursued the time-tested but now-discredited strategy of trying to catch the Hail Mary at its lowest point. 

Which should have been a great title for this chapter on the Sark Years. The lowest point. Only it wasn’t. It was just all bad. So very, very bad.

But for the truly weird, let’s go back to that Stanford game. 

Sark calls Haden down from the press box so the athletic director can argue a call with the officials. That Sark would make the request shows a mind-boggling level of immaturity and short-sightedness. That Mr. Rhodes Scholar would oblige him is even more stunning. Sure, Steve, I’m on my way! Then you close out the scene with the infamous photo of Sark apparently trying to jump on Pat Haden’s back for a piggy-back ride as they left the field, Haden looking unsure of what, exactly, he’s gotten himself into.

We don’t know, Pat. But whatever it was, you got all of us into it, too. Brutal.  

IV. The Son of an O-Line Coach

Things were about to get even worse, if you can believe it. The Clay Man Cometh.

Pop quiz: is it a good idea to hire as the head coach of a blue-blood program a coach who only has a few unimpressive years of experience as a coordinator, and much of that for offensive-minded head coaches who were the ones really running the show? Wait, I’m not done. And his primary experience at the highest level was not working for Nick Saban or Urban Meyer but for two failed coaches? Should we promote from within a failed program a guy who has little experience, has never distinguished himself as an assistant, and who no other major program would even consider hiring? I say no. Pat Haden says yes.

Now, granted, Clay did have experience as the two-time interim head coach of the USC Trojans. (USC liked to have interim coaches at least once a year in those days.) He even had two very good wins against UCLA and Utah to go with his two blowout losses during that interim run. 

But why Clay Helton? He was just a guy. A nice guy, to be sure, and one that probably wouldn’t show up drunk or tell stupid lies to the media. He wasn’t an immature clown, in other words; he was an adult. And at that point in USC history, I guess that’s all it took. (I should have sent in my resume.)

He did have one other skill, one that would help him make a boatload of money over the coming years. He was great at telling his superiors what they wanted to believe, and he was great at making them feel good with the kind of over-the-top fawning that should be humiliating for a grown man.

Clay Helton convinced Pat Haden that he was the choice for USC. He was going to establish the run. He would field teams built on toughness like the old days. He loves the running game. He loves physicality. It’s in his blood. It’s what he’s about. It’s what he knows. He was the son of an O-line coach! 

Then he instituted the Air Raid.

But I’m jumping ahead. Because while I will forever blame Pat Haden for this disastrous pick, it’s important to note that Pat wasn’t the only one who has fooled. There were a lot of former Trojan players, including Keyshawn Johnson, who were loudly lobbying for him as the answer. This goes to show just how sad our USC football-loving lives had become that we were eager to hire a guy who had no resume just because we thought he wouldn’t show up drunk or get punched in the dome by an angry running backs coach. 

I say “we” because I’m being generous to Keyshawn and friends. I actually didn’t want him at all.

Clay Helton was a mediocrity. We all know that now, although there was an animated debate about this in the early years. It turns out, if you give Clay Helton a massive talent advantage, he will win some games. Give him enough NFL players – give him Sam Darnold, Juju Smith-Schuster, Adoree Jackson, Ronald Jones, Uchenna Nwosu, Rasheem Green – and he’ll only get blown out a couple of times each season. But if he lacks a massive talent advantage, he’ll get crushed on a weekly basis. Not because of character defects like his predecessors. And not because he wasn’t trying. But because he missed his true calling; he was really born to be a junior-high gym teacher who would bring an apple to the principal’s office every day.

The fundamental problem is that Clay didn’t bring anything to the table other than a pleasant personality. He wasn’t gifted with X’s and O’s. He didn’t have an offensive or defensive philosophy that he could teach and implement. He didn’t know how to build a program culture. He was just a guy. And when you hire somebody who has nothing on his resume to suggest that he’s anything other than an ordinary, easily replaceable guy, that’s often what you end up getting.

I don’t want to go into all the gory details of Clay’s tenure. I already did that. Week after week, year after year, I chronicled our pain, and all the articles are still available if you enjoy reliving weekly root canals. I’ll just say it didn’t take long to understand what we had gotten ourselves into. Helton’s first game after taking the job was the Holiday Bowl against Wisconsin. Clay decided his team didn’t need to practice all that much, so he skipped bowl practices, and his team played like a team that skips practices. He followed that up with the Arlington Massacre against Alabama (where the players pretended to be leashed dogs right before showing that the leashes probably weren’t necessary, as those dogs weren’t going to hurt anybody), a blowout loss to Stanford, and a turnover-filled loss to Utah. Four games in, and more people were starting to see the light. Clay had some moments after that, of course, and I give him credit for keeping his team from quitting in 2016 after that 1-3 start. But with Clay, it was always a matter of if, not when, USC would have to pull the plug on his tenure. 

But this brings us to what may be the biggest problem with Clay’s tenure: it was no longer clear whether USC cared that its football program was a raging grease fire. With Hackett, we always knew the guy would get fired, because we were still sure that USC wanted to win football games. But during Helton’s tenure, that was no longer obvious. By the end, there were more planes circling the Coliseum with “Fire Clay” banners than there were butts in the seats. USC fans went from angry to apathetic. The few that stuck around – the die-hard angry ones – started a new tradition. We would get cautiously optimistic after the season and hope that maybe, just maybe, USC would finally fire Clay Helton. And instead we would get the annual press release from Heritage Hall about keeping Clay Helton. Opinions vary – they were all so good – but my favorite of these was Lynn Swann’s version from 2019, when it was obvious to everybody but Lynn Swann that the 5-7 debacle we just witnessed was part of a death spiral that was only gaining velocity. The program was, sadly, in the hands of an amiable dunce.

Before I close the book on Clay, I should make a few points. 

First, yes, I know that Clay won the conference once and won a Rose Bowl. If you go back 60 years, USC had nine coaches before Clay Helton. Six of them won Rose Bowls. Kiffin might have if not for the sanctions making his best team ineligible. Sark was only around for a year and a half, but he probably would have won one eventually. The reality is that almost every USC coach wins a Rose Bowl if they stick around long enough – and Clay definitely stuck around long enough. Don’t talk to me about that Rose Bowl.

Finally, I’m not going to go into the details. But I wouldn’t feel right about leaving this topic without hitting some of the highlights. And, for me, the highlights of Clay Helton’s tenure involved his use of language. He was the most quotable USC coach since John McKay. I’m not going to comb the archives for precise quotes. There’s no point – you guys were around to witness it – and it would be too painful to watch and read those statements.  So I leave you and the Clay years, with this:

Warriors.

Watch the film.

Son of an O line coach.

Situational mastery.

I can’t wait for people to see this team in November.

Coach Folt.

Game ball.

And for those who walked through these dark years with me, Carthago delenda est.

V. The biggest shock in years

I can’t leave things on such a low note. The history of Lincoln Riley’s tenure remains to be written, so we’ll wait before delivering any verdicts. But let’s spend just a second remembering what a shock – what a glorious, beautiful, and oh-so-welcome shock – it was to hear that USC had hired Lincoln Riley. Many Trojans thought Yogi Roth could get the gig. They weren’t even the most pessimistic camp in the fan base.  

But no sir. As Vin once put it, the impossible has happened. USC stole an elite coach from another blue-blood program. (One that really deserved it. Take that, Sooners!) And life was good again.

In the words of George Harrison, writing more than 50 years before Riley’s hiring but talking about that very day and still celebrating with us from the afterlife: 

Little darlin’, it’s been a long, cold, lonely winter

Little darlin’, it feels like years since it’s been here

Here comes the sun, doo-doo-doo-doo

Here comes the sun, and I say

It’s alright