USC athletic director Mike Bohn walked his new football coach Lincoln Riley across the top of the Coliseum on Monday, with the Los Angeles skyline and San Gabriel Mountains as the backdrop, and with each step he punctuated a loud and clear message.
The time for pleasantries has come to an end.
The West Coast’s preeminent college-football power had done this conventionally forever. The Trojans found Pete Carroll when he was a failed NFL coach, coming off a year off, and his successor was Lane Kiffin, a former Carroll assistant who’d landed at Tennessee. After that, the program poached Steve Sarkisian, another former Carroll lieutenant and Kiffin staff-mate, from Washington, and promoted Clay Helton, who’d been a Sarkisian assistant.
It’s hard to blame USC for that, because, really, that’s how football hires work at just about every level of the sport. But it also got the Trojans absolutely nowhere—they’re 96–53 with one conference title since Carroll left, after going 97–19 with seven conference titles and two national championships under him.
That’s why this year, they stopped trying to outsmart everyone, and started to throw their weight around as a school that has money, history, location and access to top talent to offer a football coach. And they wound up with one of the most accomplished 30-something coaches in the history of college football, and one of the sport’s brightest offensive minds.
If it seems like the obvious move, then so be it. No one at USC is complaining.
All told, just six coaches (Nick Saban, Dabo Swinney, Urban Meyer, Ryan Day, Brian Kelly and Riley) have made the College Football Playoff twice, and two of them switched jobs this week—with LSU’s pulling off a similar heist, in stealing Kelly away from Notre Dame. And those two didn’t switch jobs to go to the NFL. They switched jobs.
A lot of people have asked me what I think the effect of a wild, wild week in college football will have at the sport’s highest level. And to me, it’s sitting right out in the open for everyone to see.
USC and LSU weren’t hanging out, worried about being polite to their fellow bluebloods.
They were worried about getting it right.
And I’d bet there are NFL teams out there watching this now, teams that may be on the precipice of sending their coaches the way of Helton or Ed Orgeron, pondering taking a similarly cutthroat tact to get their operations right again. Of course, it’s been a while since we’ve seen a USC/LSU–style coach pillaging in the pros. But there’s no reason why some team couldn’t drop the pleasantries like Bohn did, and make it happen again.
