BoxingRobes
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How USC crashed a ‘friggin’ Ferrari’ of talent, and what it means for the next head coach
USC's stretch of poor recruiting and NFL development is due to incomplete scouting, coaching turnover and Clay Helton's mismanagement.
theathletic.com
Some highlights:
“Looking back on it,” the coach said, “he didn’t hire the right people, and maybe I am one of them. That sounds bad.”
“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.”
“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..."
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.”
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. (you could just just replace Nwosu with Greg Rousseau here)
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.
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That should give you enough to discuss...but I suggest going and reading the rest of the article. It is quite the expose on USC Football and I can not help but simply insert Miami for nearly everything said here and not see the similarities.
Thoughts?
