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Zavala

By Zavala
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Underdog
Underdog

Wow, talk about having a great pair of hands.  

Sbbruin
Sbbruin

I for one think it's a travesty what these people are doing to Clay.  He deserves their respect, admiration, and most importantly, a contract extension.  Viva Clay Helton!

kegman
kegman

That answers one question. Mangino is the new coach.

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WhatTheBuck

WhatTheBuck 28797

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3 minutes ago, mdleast said:

On the Big Noon Kickoff show this morning Reggie Bush said his pick for the next USC coach would be Deion Sanders. Maybe the plane and its occupants were reacting to that.

I came here to post about that. Brady Quinn pointed out that his career so far consisted of coaching nine games at FCS school Jackson State. I looked up his record and it’s 6-3. 2-0 this year so far and 4-3 last year. Matt Leinart had no comment. Brady also asked, “What was wrong with Clay Helton?” Lulz.

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mdmost

mdmost 43030

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Hiring someone like Deion would be handing the Pac 12 to Oregon or UCLA for the next decade. That is a ruinous hire in the same vein as us hiring Strong. Deion is not ready to go from FCS to LA. I know he's a name but that's ridiculous. SC needs to hire a program builder. I actually think James Franklin would be about the best non-Urban Meyer type hire they could make.  I don't think Cristobal is realistic. 

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Blotto

Blotto 23568

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50 minutes ago, mdmost said:

Hiring someone like Deion would be handing the Pac 12 to Oregon or UCLA for the next decade. That is a ruinous hire in the same vein as us hiring Strong. Deion is not ready to go from FCS to LA. I know he's a name but that's ridiculous. SC needs to hire a program builder. I actually think James Franklin would be about the best non-Urban Meyer type hire they could make.  I don't think Cristobal is realistic. 

a little dion goes a long way. Not sure I could take that guy at a major college program. It may happen someday, but USC wont be that school.

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South Austin

South Austin 52568

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4 minutes ago, WhatTheBuck said:

Hire a coach who can achieve success and they become great. What made Pete Carroll great before he took the USC job?

The Carroll hire was just an amazing piece of luck. He had a mediocre NFL career, and has even been out of coaching for a year when USC hired him. 

I wish Texas could fall into a hire like that.

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WhatTheBuck

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12 minutes ago, South Austin said:

The Carroll hire was just an amazing piece of luck. He had a mediocre NFL career, and has even been out of coaching for a year when USC hired him. 

I wish Texas could fall into a hire like that.

Maybe he aced the interview. That’s how Jim Tressel got the OSU job. Mike Bellotti, former Oregon coach, interviewed and asked if the Buckeyes play Michigan every year. When he was told they do, he said Oregon has a game like that. They call it the Civil War. That was the end of his candidacy. Many Buckeye fans expected former Buckeye and head coach at Minnesota Glen Mason to get the job. Mason did too. Most Buckeye fans never heard of Jim Tressel despite the fact that he’d won multiple national championships at Div I-AA Youngstown State. But Tressel aced the interview. Then he locked down recruiting in Ohio and made sure everyone knew Michigan was the most important game on the schedule. He turned the program around and now he’s a legend.

Not everything is a sure thing. As the saying goes, “You pays your money and you takes your chances.” There’s risk involved in every business decision and you can’t always buy a ready-made championship coach off the rack. USC needs to find someone who can recruit the best players in SoCal and develop them and it won’t matter if no one has ever heard of him before.

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notre dame joe

notre dame joe 195

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On 9/14/2021 at 7:31 AM, WhatTheBuck said:

No, I don’t. Fickell has never been a guy who was in a rush to move up the coaching ladder. He turned down other job offers before taking the UC job. ‘Duh...money money money’ isn’t a motivating factor for everyone. I’ve followed Luke’s career since he was a player at tOSU. I regularly hear commentary about him from players who played for him. I’d wager my predictions against yours every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

In 2011, when Jim Tressel was supposed to be suspended for five games, they named Fick the interim head coach to handle media responsibilities, etc. in the meantime. They did that because Jim Heacock (whose brother John is currently DC at ISU) was Co-DC but was superior to Luke in the hierarchy. Then Tressel got fired and Luke got stuck with the head coaching job.

Luke admitted that he wasn’t ready to be a head coach. He was happy being a coordinator for his alma mater. And he was placed in an impossible situation. Tressel was the de facto offensive coordinator and QB coach and Luke wasn’t in a position to fire anyone on that side of the ball. All he could do was to hire Mike Vrabel to fill his position on the defensive coaching staff. The head of the snake had been cut off and as much as we would’ve liked to see Fickell succeed as head coach, it just wasn’t going to happen. The program was in a state of despair.

Here’s a story I haven’t shared here before but Luke wasn’t a fan of Tom Herman. Tom was a guy eager to get ahead. According to Luke, by way of James Laurinaitis, every time ESPN showed up on campus Tom would make sure to go introduce himself to every producer and broadcaster and make himself known. Luke just focused on doing his job.

I wouldn’t expect Luke to leave the Midwest. I think he’d most like to take the Ohio State job. I think he’d take the Notre Dame or Penn State jobs if either of them came open. I’m too biased to even consider him taking the Michigan job but I’d like to think he’d never consider that. That would make me very sad. 

Franklin to SC and Fickle to PSU makes sense.  So it probably won't happen.

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Francisco 2.0

Francisco 2.0 32416

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19 minutes ago, coachherman'sgrill said:

Can anyone post The Atlantic article about Helton since it's behind a pay wall (I think)

 

I think The Atlantic is a bit high brow for an article about USC, but The Athletic put one up today.

https://theathletic.com/2843190/2021/09/23/how-usc-crashed-a-friggin-ferrari-of-talent-and-what-it-means-for-the-next-head-coach/

Spoiler

 “Clay Helton walks in the room after Nick Saban or Urban Meyer, and nobody thinks, ‘That’s a real guy,’” a former USC assistant coach, one who had been celebrated for his work on the recruiting trail for more than a decade, told The Athletic. “We had some assistants who were more recognizable than the head coach. When the heavy hitters came in — Saban, Urban Meyer, Dabo — it was the ultimate checkmate. It wasn’t anything against him (Helton). He did the best by the kids. He tried to treat everybody right, but how does USC not even end up in the top 30 nationally? (In 2020, USC had the nation’s No. 64 recruiting class — 12th in the Pac-12.) That should never happen. Never.”

And that was what he pointed to, that recruiting dynamic, when asked how USC lost its way. Regardless of on-field results, USC has traditionally been viewed as the most talented team in the Pac-12. Now, it’ll simply take the eye test or some recruiting calculations to tell you that title belongs to Oregon.

From 2009 to 2018, USC had five recruiting classes ranked in the top four nationally and nine top-10 classes. But when the NFL opened the 2021 regular season, USC wasn’t even among the top 20 programs with players on NFL rosters for Week 1. (In 2016, the Trojans were tied for second.) How does that happen? How exactly did USC fall off so badly?

After The Athletic spoke to a dozen people who either worked in the program, were closely affiliated with it, coached against the Trojans or have a deep knowledge of the Southern California recruiting scene since Pete Carroll left for the NFL, this much is clear: There are several factors that have led to the Trojans squandering their talent advantage over the rest of the West Coast — largely recruiting deficiencies and a lack of development — and their next head coach will be the one dealing with the ramifications.

“I don’t think the people who support the team realize the damage,” said one parent of a former USC player whose son played in the NFL this weekend. “You know how when celebrities get in trouble, then bring in a team to fix all their problems? SC needs five of those.”

Last week, a different former USC assistant coach, who is now coaching at another FBS program, sat on the phone reflecting on what went wrong for Helton, the man who hired him. He thought Helton did a good job of letting coaches coach and not micromanaging. But ultimately, there’s more to the gig than people skills.

“Looking back on it,” the coach said, “he didn’t hire the right people, and maybe I am one of them. That sounds bad.”

In the early 2000s, Carroll built a recruiting juggernaut at USC. He set the tone with a dynamic personality which served the Trojans well as the face of the program amid the crowded sports market that is Los Angeles. But he also built a star-studded staff of recruiters with headliners Ed Orgeron, Lane Kiffin and Steve Sarkisian, who remain some of the best recruiters in the sport nearly 20 years later. And that’s not to overlook assistants like Kennedy Polamalu and Rocky Seto, who were really strong recruiters.

 

Carroll left in 2010 to coach the Seahawks, and Kiffin was hired to replace him. Two of the coaches he brought back were Orgeron and Polamalu. The recruiting formula wasn’t going to stray too far from what had been successful.

But Kiffin, who was dealing with the fallout of crippling NCAA sanctions, was fired early in the 2013 season. Orgeron took over as the interim and went 6-2 to finish the regular season, but Sarkisian eventually landed the job. That’s when cracks started to show in the recruiting foundation. Sarkisian was a Carroll disciple himself, but most of his staff consisted of assistants who came with him from Washington, which was consistently average during Sarkisian’s time there, or assistants who were at USC but hadn’t really experienced true success there, like Helton.

“What happened was after Sark got fired, and really it started after the whole thing when Ed didn’t get the job. So you had Lane and these Pete Carroll disciples, those old-schoolers,” one of the former assistants said. “They had a way. They knew how to get talent — wide receivers were supposed to be like this; the D-linemen were supposed to play like this — it was very clear, but then it started to waver.

“Clay got thrown the keys to a friggin’ Ferrari.”

“When they brought Clay in, I just think the lack of hiring really good (assistant) coaches was the downfall,” one successful Southern California high school coach said. “Kids want to be in a professional environment and want to have an opportunity to potentially play in the NFL and play in the College Football Playoff — and they know SC is nowhere near that happening with those guys.”

During one eight-year stretch under Carroll that sparked seven top-four finishes, the Trojans produced 16 first-round picks — 10 more than USC has had in the last eight years.

“Clay’s a nice dude but had no edge to him,” said a former Trojan player who now works in the NFL. “They took advantage of him. Pete was a grinder but as a player you never knew that. When the players weren’t around, he was totally different with the staff. Pete had a big personality and was fun, but he was also a disciplinarian. He had KP (Polamalu) and Ed Orgeron — those guys handled the discipline. They were tone-setters. Pete managed his staff in a great way. That’s what they need to get back to. Someone who can capture the team and the city.”

As far as recruiting went, there was a lot of dead weight on Helton’s staff. Former defensive coordinator Clancy Pendergast was never too interested in recruiting. Neither was former secondary coach Ronnie Bradford nor offensive line coach Neil Callaway.

“He had guys on the staff who he let not recruit at all,” one of the former assistants said. “He got away from what USC is.”

Said one former recruiting staffer, “Coaches on the 2018 and 2019 staffs didn’t recruit. Didn’t care. No leadership. Acted like it was a country club to hang out rather than compete. It was 1,000 percent laziness.”

That helps explain how defensive players USC could really use on its roster now got away during the 2019 recruiting cycle: Kayvon Thibodeaux, Mykael Wrightand Mase Funa, who all signed with Oregon, and Trent McDuffie, who signed with Washington. Another big miss came a year later in the 2020 class, when five-star quarterback Bryce Young, from Trojans pipeline Mater Dei, decommitted from USC to sign with Alabama as uncertainty over Helton’s job status reigned.

Another big problem under Helton’s staff(s) was a noticeable lack of development with some of its blue-chip signees. Helton signed 44 blue-chip prospects during his first three recruiting cycles as USC’s head coach.

The 2018 class, the last of those three cycles, just became draft eligible this past year. Only four of those 44 blue-chip prospects were drafted on the first or second day of the draft; only two (Austin Jackson and Alijah Vera-Tucker) went in the first round.

The Trojans signed eight five-star prospects during that span. One has been drafted (Amon-Ra St. Brown). Five transferred to other programs. Two got into legal trouble. One went undrafted.

The only non-blue-chip player USC has developed into an NFL Draft pick over the past five or six years has been Uchenna Nwosu.

“It was a combo (of things),” another former recruiting staffer said. “Some bad players, some coaches who weren’t great evaluators or teachers. Every coach has a different personality and wants different traits in guys. When you are changing coaches every year, the new guy isn’t going to like some of the players the old coach signed.”

“It was a real professional approach to developing their players (under Carroll),” the high school coach said. “You’re looking at the players they had and how much better they got in the time — I mean, look at Clay Matthews III. The guy was a beast in the NFL because of what he was able to do in that program and how much better he got from the time he started to the time he ended. I don’t see them having a whole lot of that now.”

Another high school coach who has sent several players to USC over the years hears from his friends who are Trojans fans every signing day. They’re beaming with excitement about the players.

“‘They got this guy, this guy, this guy!’  But a lot of the time, those guys don’t fit what they’re trying to do,” this coach said. “They signed them because they’re a five-star. This is not basketball. This is football, and you want to try to get the guys who will fit your spot.

“I think it’s really hard to develop people when you’re starting from a fit deficit. I think that’s the problem. Maybe they did develop that kid, but that kid’s a 3-4 backer and you’re trying to play a 4-3 or whatever. … I think it all starts with the fact they’re getting guys who don’t fit and they’re having to develop them into something they’re not.”

There’s an interesting college football experiment unfolding in Los Angeles right now. At USC, talent acquisition has always been king. At the opposite end is UCLA, which has prioritized fit and development above all else under Chip Kelly at the expense of elite talent.

Kelly posted losing records in his first three seasons and didn’t show signs of a potential breakthrough until this month. The same kind of patience will never be afforded at USC, which has suffered through just four losing seasons since 1962 — UCLA has had 21 in the same span.

“They have a talent deficit with SC,” this high school coach said of the Bruins, “but they’re much more well fit into their program than SC ever is. That’s why I think when they play each other, they compete so well. … I think there’s probably a happy medium somewhere in the middle.”

The expectations at USC are fairly straightforward: Compete for Rose Bowls and national championships and pull in top-10 recruiting classes.

Top-10 classes are determined by the recruiting sites, and while they’re typically accurate at the top, USC has generally been an outlier. Stars matter, but they seem to matter more at Alabama and Ohio State than they do at USC, which has a top-10 roster according to 247Sports’ team talent composite, but doesn’t have the talent that reflects a top-10 team.

In some instances, the Trojans signed players who were simply overrated by the recruiting services.

“They’re over-ranked,” the parent of the former Trojan and current NFL player said. “And then the machine perpetuates it because they go, ‘Hey, who has the most five-stars?’ Everybody wants to have the most five-star athletes. It doesn’t matter if a guy is a five-star or not. … So they get all these guys on their team but they’re not good football players.”

“USC always is gonna be ranked top 10 in recruiting but that’s because when you commit to USC you’re all of a sudden ‘a great’ recruit,’” one of the former assistants said. “We had coaches in the building who knew the guys at (the recruiting sites) and they’d call them, ‘Hey I need you to rate this kid as a 4-star before I take his commitment.’ That’s the way that stuff works.

“If we signed 25 kids there were 10 of them that were that way. We had so many (four and five-star guys) who were just terrible. We signed one five-star linebacker and he would’ve been a really good player 30 years ago when it was just going from A-gap to A-gap but not these days when you gotta go tackle perimeter screens now and go sideline to sideline. Look at all those cats that Alabama is running around with. Saban turns down 10 five-stars a year because he knows they’re not good enough.”

So many of USC’s recruiting problems over the past four or five years have been self-inflicted: laziness, poor evaluation, lack of development and investment. At one point two years ago, one USC assistant coach sat in his office and casually joked that their school-issued cell phone might be tapped by authorities. That likely isn’t true, but at the time, the Trojans’ athletic department should have been on edge. It was months removed from the Varsity Blues admissions scandal and, a year and a half earlier, it was caught in the middle of the FBI’s probe into college basketball recruiting.

USC had to be clean in a recruiting environment that is far from it.

“There’s probably 20 kids a year, maybe 30 that are getting paid big money to play college football,” the former assistant said. “The vast majority of them are quarterbacks and D-linemen. We had multiple staff meetings where Clay said, ‘If you get caught cheating, you are being fired.’ His thing was, ‘If they fire me, it’s gonna be for losing. Not cheating.’

“USC was coming off the scandal, and he’d been part of that staff coming back. We couldn’t play the game the way the game is played at that level. Now with NIL, you can do it, which is why they created the BLVD (USC’s in-house partnership with J1S, which focuses on helping student-athletes maximize their market value). That is gonna be huge for them.”

Of course, as all of these recruiting dynamics were slowly unraveling, the Trojans’ on-field performance started to dip. USC went 13-12 over the 2018 and 2019 season and hasn’t won the Pac-12 since 2017. To make up for its subpar on-field performance, the program has to sell its natural advantages like proximity to Hollywood and setting of Los Angeles on social media.

“(SC) is selling the sizzle, not the steak,” one of the high school coaches said. “It’s like, well, I want the meat and potatoes. I want to know exactly how we’re going to find a way to not lose to Stanford by 21 points.”

 

One of the high school coaches stood on the sidelines of Howard Jones Field and simply observed a couple of years ago. He had visited plenty of practices conducted by elite programs in the past, so this wasn’t foreign to him.

He’d seen enough to know he didn’t like what he heard.

“Right after their stretching lines, when they were getting ready to go practice, their coaches were all screaming, ‘Everybody wants to be us,’” this coach said. “It’s like, ‘Dude, there’s nobody who wants to be you guys.’ They’re living kind of off that old SC heritage.”

It’s also something that other Pac-12 coaches had taken note of as well, seeing an undisciplined team built on false bravado. “You watch how they behave out there on the field,” said one Pac-12 South coach. “We’ve heard about the bad locker room and that they’re allowed to do whatever they want, acting like jackasses on the field.”

Other Pac-12 coaches point to USC chasing recruiting stars and recruiting the kids who are, according to a high school coach, “not winners,” as well as opting for a style of play that was far removed from what had been in USC’s DNA, a program which used to pride itself on physical football.

“They’ve lost it in the trenches,” said one Pac-12 North coach. “If you want to win championships, you’ve gotta be able to run the football and be physical up front. And they can’t, and they’re not. Part of that was going to the Air Raid, because if you’re going to that, you gotta buy into that mentality and be all in. Well, it might look good and you might have good stats, but that changes the mentality of your team. USC turned soft. It just is what it is.”

USC’s brand still has some pull. But the next coach will have to restore the aura and it’s going to require some patience.

“They got left so far behind the rest of the country that everyone started seeing that the brand was wearing down,” one of the former recruiting staffers said.

The 2019 recruiting class has some true gems, such as Drake Jackson and Drake London, the two best players on the 2021 team. Chris Steele has turned into an All-Pac-12 player and Kedon Slovis has been better than anyone expected. But the previous staff acted out of desperation late in that recruiting cycle and looked to add bodies, so the class was filled with several players who appear to have no reasonable path toward contributing on the field in the future. The new coach will inherit a lot of those players.

The 2020 class was built during the peak of Helton hot-seat talk and has some nice pieces that have developed well, but that class is more notable for the players the Trojans missed on — nearly all of California’s top prospects, like Young and five-star linebacker Justin Flowe — than those it did. USC didn’t sign a quarterback, linebacker or a single defensive back.

The 2021 class was much improved, thanks to a recruiting infrastructure that was beefed up after USC’s administration devoted more resources to it. And it hired assistant coaches who were better recruiters, like Donte Williams and Craig Naivar, who did a great job recruiting the secondary and rebuilding its talent. And that class has Foreman, and Jaxson Dart, who displayed his potential this past weekend.

That class is the foundation of USC’s future. As for the Class of 2022: The Trojans have a commitment from the state’s top-rated player, Domani Jackson, five-star defensive lineman Mykel Williams and four-star quarterback Devin Brown. But the offensive staff struggled to land verbal commitments from talented in-state skill players like Raleek Brown (Oklahoma), Tetairoa McMillan (Oregon) and C.J. Williams (Notre Dame).

And with Helton’s firing, this will be a transition class.

That’s three out of the past four recruiting classes that will likely be below the normal USC standard. A new coach will help, and the transfer portal could fill some gaps, but as of now the Trojans’ 2022 squad has the potential to be their least talented team in a long time. While the roster may be fine in comparison to most of the Pac-12, it won’t stack up well with Oregon, which keeps building its depth and adding high-quality players in impressive fashion.

“Mario (Cristobal) is now that guy in the Pac-12,” one of the former assistants said. “He’s recruiting at Oregon the way they recruit at Alabama. The Oregons of the world start beating SC in recruiting. Really, after Ed left (in 2014), in comes the SEC and they’ve infiltrated, so now you’ve got Alabama, LSU and Georgia. It was, ‘Go in and get what you want.’ USC lost its presence. No one was protecting the land.”

So yes, a new coach will take over a USC program with national and Pac-12 championship expectations. But USC’s new coach will not be walking into a “normal” USC situation, where the roster is stocked with more talent than everyone else on the West Coast, like Kiffin and Helton inherited.

“USC the brand has been hurt so bad. Whoever they get, it needs to be a name — oh damn, that’s the USC coach now?” one of the former assistants said. “Getting offered by USC used to be a big deal. Guys would cry on the phone when I told them they had a USC offer, but that doesn’t happen anymore. I think James Franklin’s name was huge. He took back a state when he got rolling at Penn State. He’s got the No. 1 class in recruiting. He’s been in the SEC. He’d be a minority hire. That would be beneficial.

“They’re gonna need something different that people want to see that guy win. Like, we’re rooting for that dude that just got the SC job.”

 

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ImissWallyPryor

ImissWallyPryor 9046

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16 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

 

I think The Atlantic is a bit high brow for an article about USC, but The Athletic put one up today.

https://theathletic.com/2843190/2021/09/23/how-usc-crashed-a-friggin-ferrari-of-talent-and-what-it-means-for-the-next-head-coach/

  Reveal hidden contents

 “Clay Helton walks in the room after Nick Saban or Urban Meyer, and nobody thinks, ‘That’s a real guy,’” a former USC assistant coach, one who had been celebrated for his work on the recruiting trail for more than a decade, told The Athletic. “We had some assistants who were more recognizable than the head coach. When the heavy hitters came in — Saban, Urban Meyer, Dabo — it was the ultimate checkmate. It wasn’t anything against him (Helton). He did the best by the kids. He tried to treat everybody right, but how does USC not even end up in the top 30 nationally? (In 2020, USC had the nation’s No. 64 recruiting class — 12th in the Pac-12.) That should never happen. Never.”

And that was what he pointed to, that recruiting dynamic, when asked how USC lost its way. Regardless of on-field results, USC has traditionally been viewed as the most talented team in the Pac-12. Now, it’ll simply take the eye test or some recruiting calculations to tell you that title belongs to Oregon.

From 2009 to 2018, USC had five recruiting classes ranked in the top four nationally and nine top-10 classes. But when the NFL opened the 2021 regular season, USC wasn’t even among the top 20 programs with players on NFL rosters for Week 1. (In 2016, the Trojans were tied for second.) How does that happen? How exactly did USC fall off so badly?

After The Athletic spoke to a dozen people who either worked in the program, were closely affiliated with it, coached against the Trojans or have a deep knowledge of the Southern California recruiting scene since Pete Carroll left for the NFL, this much is clear: There are several factors that have led to the Trojans squandering their talent advantage over the rest of the West Coast — largely recruiting deficiencies and a lack of development — and their next head coach will be the one dealing with the ramifications.

“I don’t think the people who support the team realize the damage,” said one parent of a former USC player whose son played in the NFL this weekend. “You know how when celebrities get in trouble, then bring in a team to fix all their problems? SC needs five of those.”

Last week, a different former USC assistant coach, who is now coaching at another FBS program, sat on the phone reflecting on what went wrong for Helton, the man who hired him. He thought Helton did a good job of letting coaches coach and not micromanaging. But ultimately, there’s more to the gig than people skills.

“Looking back on it,” the coach said, “he didn’t hire the right people, and maybe I am one of them. That sounds bad.”

In the early 2000s, Carroll built a recruiting juggernaut at USC. He set the tone with a dynamic personality which served the Trojans well as the face of the program amid the crowded sports market that is Los Angeles. But he also built a star-studded staff of recruiters with headliners Ed Orgeron, Lane Kiffin and Steve Sarkisian, who remain some of the best recruiters in the sport nearly 20 years later. And that’s not to overlook assistants like Kennedy Polamalu and Rocky Seto, who were really strong recruiters.

 

Carroll left in 2010 to coach the Seahawks, and Kiffin was hired to replace him. Two of the coaches he brought back were Orgeron and Polamalu. The recruiting formula wasn’t going to stray too far from what had been successful.

But Kiffin, who was dealing with the fallout of crippling NCAA sanctions, was fired early in the 2013 season. Orgeron took over as the interim and went 6-2 to finish the regular season, but Sarkisian eventually landed the job. That’s when cracks started to show in the recruiting foundation. Sarkisian was a Carroll disciple himself, but most of his staff consisted of assistants who came with him from Washington, which was consistently average during Sarkisian’s time there, or assistants who were at USC but hadn’t really experienced true success there, like Helton.

“What happened was after Sark got fired, and really it started after the whole thing when Ed didn’t get the job. So you had Lane and these Pete Carroll disciples, those old-schoolers,” one of the former assistants said. “They had a way. They knew how to get talent — wide receivers were supposed to be like this; the D-linemen were supposed to play like this — it was very clear, but then it started to waver.

“Clay got thrown the keys to a friggin’ Ferrari.”

“When they brought Clay in, I just think the lack of hiring really good (assistant) coaches was the downfall,” one successful Southern California high school coach said. “Kids want to be in a professional environment and want to have an opportunity to potentially play in the NFL and play in the College Football Playoff — and they know SC is nowhere near that happening with those guys.”

During one eight-year stretch under Carroll that sparked seven top-four finishes, the Trojans produced 16 first-round picks — 10 more than USC has had in the last eight years.

“Clay’s a nice dude but had no edge to him,” said a former Trojan player who now works in the NFL. “They took advantage of him. Pete was a grinder but as a player you never knew that. When the players weren’t around, he was totally different with the staff. Pete had a big personality and was fun, but he was also a disciplinarian. He had KP (Polamalu) and Ed Orgeron — those guys handled the discipline. They were tone-setters. Pete managed his staff in a great way. That’s what they need to get back to. Someone who can capture the team and the city.”

As far as recruiting went, there was a lot of dead weight on Helton’s staff. Former defensive coordinator Clancy Pendergast was never too interested in recruiting. Neither was former secondary coach Ronnie Bradford nor offensive line coach Neil Callaway.

“He had guys on the staff who he let not recruit at all,” one of the former assistants said. “He got away from what USC is.”

Said one former recruiting staffer, “Coaches on the 2018 and 2019 staffs didn’t recruit. Didn’t care. No leadership. Acted like it was a country club to hang out rather than compete. It was 1,000 percent laziness.”

That helps explain how defensive players USC could really use on its roster now got away during the 2019 recruiting cycle: Kayvon Thibodeaux, Mykael Wrightand Mase Funa, who all signed with Oregon, and Trent McDuffie, who signed with Washington. Another big miss came a year later in the 2020 class, when five-star quarterback Bryce Young, from Trojans pipeline Mater Dei, decommitted from USC to sign with Alabama as uncertainty over Helton’s job status reigned.

Another big problem under Helton’s staff(s) was a noticeable lack of development with some of its blue-chip signees. Helton signed 44 blue-chip prospects during his first three recruiting cycles as USC’s head coach.

The 2018 class, the last of those three cycles, just became draft eligible this past year. Only four of those 44 blue-chip prospects were drafted on the first or second day of the draft; only two (Austin Jackson and Alijah Vera-Tucker) went in the first round.

The Trojans signed eight five-star prospects during that span. One has been drafted (Amon-Ra St. Brown). Five transferred to other programs. Two got into legal trouble. One went undrafted.

The only non-blue-chip player USC has developed into an NFL Draft pick over the past five or six years has been Uchenna Nwosu.

“It was a combo (of things),” another former recruiting staffer said. “Some bad players, some coaches who weren’t great evaluators or teachers. Every coach has a different personality and wants different traits in guys. When you are changing coaches every year, the new guy isn’t going to like some of the players the old coach signed.”

“It was a real professional approach to developing their players (under Carroll),” the high school coach said. “You’re looking at the players they had and how much better they got in the time — I mean, look at Clay Matthews III. The guy was a beast in the NFL because of what he was able to do in that program and how much better he got from the time he started to the time he ended. I don’t see them having a whole lot of that now.”

Another high school coach who has sent several players to USC over the years hears from his friends who are Trojans fans every signing day. They’re beaming with excitement about the players.

“‘They got this guy, this guy, this guy!’  But a lot of the time, those guys don’t fit what they’re trying to do,” this coach said. “They signed them because they’re a five-star. This is not basketball. This is football, and you want to try to get the guys who will fit your spot.

“I think it’s really hard to develop people when you’re starting from a fit deficit. I think that’s the problem. Maybe they did develop that kid, but that kid’s a 3-4 backer and you’re trying to play a 4-3 or whatever. … I think it all starts with the fact they’re getting guys who don’t fit and they’re having to develop them into something they’re not.”

There’s an interesting college football experiment unfolding in Los Angeles right now. At USC, talent acquisition has always been king. At the opposite end is UCLA, which has prioritized fit and development above all else under Chip Kelly at the expense of elite talent.

Kelly posted losing records in his first three seasons and didn’t show signs of a potential breakthrough until this month. The same kind of patience will never be afforded at USC, which has suffered through just four losing seasons since 1962 — UCLA has had 21 in the same span.

“They have a talent deficit with SC,” this high school coach said of the Bruins, “but they’re much more well fit into their program than SC ever is. That’s why I think when they play each other, they compete so well. … I think there’s probably a happy medium somewhere in the middle.”

The expectations at USC are fairly straightforward: Compete for Rose Bowls and national championships and pull in top-10 recruiting classes.

Top-10 classes are determined by the recruiting sites, and while they’re typically accurate at the top, USC has generally been an outlier. Stars matter, but they seem to matter more at Alabama and Ohio State than they do at USC, which has a top-10 roster according to 247Sports’ team talent composite, but doesn’t have the talent that reflects a top-10 team.

In some instances, the Trojans signed players who were simply overrated by the recruiting services.

“They’re over-ranked,” the parent of the former Trojan and current NFL player said. “And then the machine perpetuates it because they go, ‘Hey, who has the most five-stars?’ Everybody wants to have the most five-star athletes. It doesn’t matter if a guy is a five-star or not. … So they get all these guys on their team but they’re not good football players.”

“USC always is gonna be ranked top 10 in recruiting but that’s because when you commit to USC you’re all of a sudden ‘a great’ recruit,’” one of the former assistants said. “We had coaches in the building who knew the guys at (the recruiting sites) and they’d call them, ‘Hey I need you to rate this kid as a 4-star before I take his commitment.’ That’s the way that stuff works.

“If we signed 25 kids there were 10 of them that were that way. We had so many (four and five-star guys) who were just terrible. We signed one five-star linebacker and he would’ve been a really good player 30 years ago when it was just going from A-gap to A-gap but not these days when you gotta go tackle perimeter screens now and go sideline to sideline. Look at all those cats that Alabama is running around with. Saban turns down 10 five-stars a year because he knows they’re not good enough.”

So many of USC’s recruiting problems over the past four or five years have been self-inflicted: laziness, poor evaluation, lack of development and investment. At one point two years ago, one USC assistant coach sat in his office and casually joked that their school-issued cell phone might be tapped by authorities. That likely isn’t true, but at the time, the Trojans’ athletic department should have been on edge. It was months removed from the Varsity Blues admissions scandal and, a year and a half earlier, it was caught in the middle of the FBI’s probe into college basketball recruiting.

USC had to be clean in a recruiting environment that is far from it.

“There’s probably 20 kids a year, maybe 30 that are getting paid big money to play college football,” the former assistant said. “The vast majority of them are quarterbacks and D-linemen. We had multiple staff meetings where Clay said, ‘If you get caught cheating, you are being fired.’ His thing was, ‘If they fire me, it’s gonna be for losing. Not cheating.’

“USC was coming off the scandal, and he’d been part of that staff coming back. We couldn’t play the game the way the game is played at that level. Now with NIL, you can do it, which is why they created the BLVD (USC’s in-house partnership with J1S, which focuses on helping student-athletes maximize their market value). That is gonna be huge for them.”

Of course, as all of these recruiting dynamics were slowly unraveling, the Trojans’ on-field performance started to dip. USC went 13-12 over the 2018 and 2019 season and hasn’t won the Pac-12 since 2017. To make up for its subpar on-field performance, the program has to sell its natural advantages like proximity to Hollywood and setting of Los Angeles on social media.

“(SC) is selling the sizzle, not the steak,” one of the high school coaches said. “It’s like, well, I want the meat and potatoes. I want to know exactly how we’re going to find a way to not lose to Stanford by 21 points.”

 

One of the high school coaches stood on the sidelines of Howard Jones Field and simply observed a couple of years ago. He had visited plenty of practices conducted by elite programs in the past, so this wasn’t foreign to him.

He’d seen enough to know he didn’t like what he heard.

“Right after their stretching lines, when they were getting ready to go practice, their coaches were all screaming, ‘Everybody wants to be us,’” this coach said. “It’s like, ‘Dude, there’s nobody who wants to be you guys.’ They’re living kind of off that old SC heritage.”

It’s also something that other Pac-12 coaches had taken note of as well, seeing an undisciplined team built on false bravado. “You watch how they behave out there on the field,” said one Pac-12 South coach. “We’ve heard about the bad locker room and that they’re allowed to do whatever they want, acting like jackasses on the field.”

Other Pac-12 coaches point to USC chasing recruiting stars and recruiting the kids who are, according to a high school coach, “not winners,” as well as opting for a style of play that was far removed from what had been in USC’s DNA, a program which used to pride itself on physical football.

“They’ve lost it in the trenches,” said one Pac-12 North coach. “If you want to win championships, you’ve gotta be able to run the football and be physical up front. And they can’t, and they’re not. Part of that was going to the Air Raid, because if you’re going to that, you gotta buy into that mentality and be all in. Well, it might look good and you might have good stats, but that changes the mentality of your team. USC turned soft. It just is what it is.”

USC’s brand still has some pull. But the next coach will have to restore the aura and it’s going to require some patience.

“They got left so far behind the rest of the country that everyone started seeing that the brand was wearing down,” one of the former recruiting staffers said.

The 2019 recruiting class has some true gems, such as Drake Jackson and Drake London, the two best players on the 2021 team. Chris Steele has turned into an All-Pac-12 player and Kedon Slovis has been better than anyone expected. But the previous staff acted out of desperation late in that recruiting cycle and looked to add bodies, so the class was filled with several players who appear to have no reasonable path toward contributing on the field in the future. The new coach will inherit a lot of those players.

The 2020 class was built during the peak of Helton hot-seat talk and has some nice pieces that have developed well, but that class is more notable for the players the Trojans missed on — nearly all of California’s top prospects, like Young and five-star linebacker Justin Flowe — than those it did. USC didn’t sign a quarterback, linebacker or a single defensive back.

The 2021 class was much improved, thanks to a recruiting infrastructure that was beefed up after USC’s administration devoted more resources to it. And it hired assistant coaches who were better recruiters, like Donte Williams and Craig Naivar, who did a great job recruiting the secondary and rebuilding its talent. And that class has Foreman, and Jaxson Dart, who displayed his potential this past weekend.

That class is the foundation of USC’s future. As for the Class of 2022: The Trojans have a commitment from the state’s top-rated player, Domani Jackson, five-star defensive lineman Mykel Williams and four-star quarterback Devin Brown. But the offensive staff struggled to land verbal commitments from talented in-state skill players like Raleek Brown (Oklahoma), Tetairoa McMillan (Oregon) and C.J. Williams (Notre Dame).

And with Helton’s firing, this will be a transition class.

That’s three out of the past four recruiting classes that will likely be below the normal USC standard. A new coach will help, and the transfer portal could fill some gaps, but as of now the Trojans’ 2022 squad has the potential to be their least talented team in a long time. While the roster may be fine in comparison to most of the Pac-12, it won’t stack up well with Oregon, which keeps building its depth and adding high-quality players in impressive fashion.

“Mario (Cristobal) is now that guy in the Pac-12,” one of the former assistants said. “He’s recruiting at Oregon the way they recruit at Alabama. The Oregons of the world start beating SC in recruiting. Really, after Ed left (in 2014), in comes the SEC and they’ve infiltrated, so now you’ve got Alabama, LSU and Georgia. It was, ‘Go in and get what you want.’ USC lost its presence. No one was protecting the land.”

So yes, a new coach will take over a USC program with national and Pac-12 championship expectations. But USC’s new coach will not be walking into a “normal” USC situation, where the roster is stocked with more talent than everyone else on the West Coast, like Kiffin and Helton inherited.

“USC the brand has been hurt so bad. Whoever they get, it needs to be a name — oh damn, that’s the USC coach now?” one of the former assistants said. “Getting offered by USC used to be a big deal. Guys would cry on the phone when I told them they had a USC offer, but that doesn’t happen anymore. I think James Franklin’s name was huge. He took back a state when he got rolling at Penn State. He’s got the No. 1 class in recruiting. He’s been in the SEC. He’d be a minority hire. That would be beneficial.

“They’re gonna need something different that people want to see that guy win. Like, we’re rooting for that dude that just got the SC job.”

 

Damn, a lot of that sounds familiar. In fact, too much of it. 

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Sawbonz

Sawbonz 27584

Posted
Posted
On 9/18/2021 at 10:57 AM, Blotto said:

a little dion goes a long way. Not sure I could take that guy at a major college program. It may happen someday, but USC wont be that school.

People who are truly great at something often don’t make very good teachers/coaches. They are immensely physically gifted and generally self motivated to a fanatical degree to improve, and they just don’t understand the student/player who doesn’t have that degree of physical or mental ability and cant or won’t give that level of effort

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South Austin

South Austin 52568

Posted
Posted (edited)
10 hours ago, Sawbonz said:

People who are truly great at something often don’t make very good teachers/coaches. They are immensely physically gifted and generally self motivated to a fanatical degree to improve, and they just don’t understand the student/player who doesn’t have that degree of physical or mental ability and cant or won’t give that level of effort

And to phrase this with a specific question, can you name a coach -- NFL, NBA, college football, or college hoops -- who excelled as both a player and a coach?  I'm sure you might name a few, but I can't think of one off hand, and most of the greats we think of in terms of championships -- Pat Riley, Phil Jackson, Bill Bilicheck, Nick Saban, Bill Walsh -- had mediocre playing days at best.

Edited by South Austin
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WhatTheBuck

WhatTheBuck 28797

Posted
Posted
18 minutes ago, South Austin said:

And to phrase this with a specific question, can you name a coach -- NFL, NBA, college football, or college hoops -- who excelled as both a player and a coach?  I'm sure you might name a few, but I can't think of one off hand, and most of the greats we think of in terms of championships -- Pat Riley, Phil Jackson, Bill Bilicheck, Nick Saban, Bill Walsh -- had mediocre playing days at best.

Steve Spurrier. 

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Spoetzl

Spoetzl 181

Posted
Posted
30 minutes ago, South Austin said:

And to phrase this with a specific question, can you name a coach -- NFL, NBA, college football, or college hoops -- who excelled as both a player and a coach?  I'm sure you might name a few, but I can't think of one off hand, and most of the greats we think of in terms of championships -- Pat Riley, Phil Jackson, Bill Bilicheck, Nick Saban, Bill Walsh -- had mediocre playing days at best.

Darrell Royal

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Rudy Rutabaga

Rudy Rutabaga 8188

Posted
Posted
42 minutes ago, South Austin said:

And to phrase this with a specific question, can you name a coach -- NFL, NBA, college football, or college hoops -- who excelled as both a player and a coach?  I'm sure you might name a few, but I can't think of one off hand, and most of the greats we think of in terms of championships -- Pat Riley, Phil Jackson, Bill Bilicheck, Nick Saban, Bill Walsh -- had mediocre playing days at best.

Tom Landry

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shakahorn

shakahorn 1645

Posted
Posted
3 hours ago, South Austin said:

And to phrase this with a specific question, can you name a coach -- NFL, NBA, college football, or college hoops -- who excelled as both a player and a coach?  I'm sure you might name a few, but I can't think of one off hand, and most of the greats we think of in terms of championships -- Pat Riley, Phil Jackson, Bill Bilicheck, Nick Saban, Bill Walsh -- had mediocre playing days at best.

Off the top of my head, NBA seems a bit easier:

Steve Kerr (if Rudy T's playing career qualifies then Kerr certainly qualifies)

Bill Russell

 

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South Austin

South Austin 52568

Posted
Posted
10 minutes ago, shakahorn said:

Off the top of my head, NBA seems a bit easier:

Steve Kerr (if Rudy T's playing career qualifies then Kerr certainly qualifies)

The original post to which I responded used the term "truly great."  Steve Kerr was a fine role player providing range off the bench.  But he doesn't qualify as truly great.

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