You read the stories this past week about the lasting damage Clay Helton did to the USC program. Trojan fans knew these things a few years ago. They were well ahead of the curve in seeing that Helton was a dead-end coach who would never create the standard of performance a proud football school deserves.
Many national media figures — either on purpose (to protect sources) or due to a desire to withhold a long-term assessment — didn’t bring the hammer to Helton. Maybe it was the fact Sam Darnold led USC to two strong seasons in 2016 and 2017, and that few national voices were willing to say Darnold hid Helton’s weaknesses. Maybe it was the fact USC improved by three games from 2018 to 2019 and beat Utah, suggesting that a resurgence was just around the corner.
Whatever the case, national commentators and pundits weren’t willing to call a spade a spade with Clay Helton until he was fired. Local media figures were up front about this topic and expressed a lot more urgency about USC football’s crisis years ago when this situation first needed to be addressed.
Saturday against Oregon State, anyone who hadn’t followed USC football all that closely in recent years, and who was curious to see if the physical absence of Helton from the sidelines would transform this program — its players, its assistant coaches and its locker room — gained a clear answer:
Nope. Not, at least, within the 2021 season and a situation managed by an interim coach.
This is not a problem an interim coach can fix. It’s not a matter of making this one X-and-O tweak or inserting one particular player.
Yes, Jaxson Dart — had he been healthy — might have been able to make this game closer and more competitive. However, he doesn’t play defense, and USC’s defense was pillow-soft in yet another home game in which the Trojans gave up more than 40 points to a team that had already endured a bad loss this season.
Stanford almost got shut out by Kansas State. It then came to the Los Angeles Coliseum and posted 42 points on USC.
Oregon State lost to a Purdue squad that very nearly lost to a dreadful Illinois team this past Saturday. The Beavers came to the Coliseum and went wild, scoring their 42nd point in the first minute of the fourth quarter.
USC: soft, weak, slow, undisciplined, unprepared and unfocused. It’s nothing we hadn’t seen before.
Crucially, it’s important to remember that USC was awful in the first 29 minutes against Washington State, trailing 14-0, before Dart threw a 38-yard touchdown pass on fourth-and-9. USC has a famous history of fourth-and-9 conversions (recall 2005 against Notre Dame), but no team can count on long fourth-down conversions as sources of inspiration. That is unsustainable.
USC had a long 2021 offseason to get stronger, sharper, better and tougher after the truncated 2020 season in which the pandemic limited every team’s ability to practice, prepare and learn. The 2020 season was not a real verdict on Clay Helton, because no Pac-12 team was any good a year ago. The 2021 offseason, however, with spring ball and normal practice schedules back in our lives, was going to show which coaches could get organized, get smart, and get on top of various flaws from the previous year. The good coaches were going to fix problems and insist on excellence.
USC did not have a good coach this offseason. The culture in and around practice, the lack of accountability, all the things about Helton the national media finally got around to reporting this past week, were laid bare.
An interim coach can’t fix a problem this big, this pervasive, this entrenched. This loss technically goes to Donte Williams, but it essentially goes to Helton, and everyone in and around the USC program knows it.
