SB Nation User Blog: DC Trojan

Stewart Mandel is frank, bordering on direct, about Notre Dame

DC Trojan — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:43:50 -0000

Stewart Mandel is frank, bordering on direct, about Notre Dame

I don't know if any of you ever watched the old UK sitcom "Yes Minister," about the shenanigans of a member of Cabinet and his efforts to get the Civil Servants in his department to do what he wanted, but there was one classic line in there explaining civil service terminology for a meeting where there was blood on the floor afterwards: frank, bordering on direct.

Which comes to mind because Stewart Mandel finally got round to saying something that a fair few others have concluded: Notre Dame isn't a powerhouse any longer, and they aren't even keeping up with their natural peers Northwestern and Stanford.

I'm not posting this in the spirit of OMFG LULZ ND WUZ PWNED, because we've all had our issues with the output of Mr Mandel, and I'm sure our Domer rivals have their thoughts in a similar vein. But when you have someone whose job is broadly to write the conventional wisdom saying that perhaps you've had your day as a national football power... well, that has to suck.

)Good thing we're still at the stage of people like Matt Hayes using phrases like "once vaunted" to describe a defense that's had 3 crap and a couple of iffy games.)

"We messed it up," Carroll said. "We probably tried too hard. Our guys, mentally, were bottled up...

DC Trojan — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 07:26:19 -0000

"We messed it up," Carroll said. "We probably tried too hard. Our guys, mentally, were bottled up with the stuff we were doing. We tried to scheme too much. We made mistakes that we normally wouldn't make, and we didn't play the way we normally play. It was just a disastrous outcome."

After Oregon scored 47 points and gained 613 yards, Carroll said the plan USC used is "going in the can."

Let's not become Florida State

DC Trojan — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 23:59:27 -0000

Bumped...DC is too modest not to have put this on the front page. - P

I've been struck by some of the reactions I've seen on last night's game because they brought to mind a Wall Street Journal article from a few years ago that ranked college programs based on the number of players that they put in the NFL. Florida State was one of the highest ranked at the time, but the article noted that the team had started to get worse results because their habit of recruiting top-notch athletes and having them just flat outplay the opposition was no longer working as well.

Then I thought about the tendency of Bobby Bowden to keep coaching in-house, culminating in re-hiring Chuck D'Amato, and Mickey Adams complaining the other week because it was getting harder to set up good defensive schemes that the opposition couldn't get past.

Any of this sound superficially similar to where SC is right now on the coaching side of life? I don't know what Pete Carroll and the other coaches have in mind for the rest of the season, for the recruiting trail, and next year, but I sure hope it isn't just doubling down on what's worked before.

It's not the general attitude that I'm worried about. Pete Carroll has said a lot about how he had an epiphany about what his philosophy was, and I've always taken that to be the focus on a positive outlook and accountability. That is absolutely worth preserving - but let's see these kids play like they really think they're having to earn something on every play. And let's give them some new schemes to work with, so that they aren't trying to outplay people whose coaches are out-thinking them. There's no point in McKnight getting better at interior running and ball protection, or Bradford emerging as a real threat, if we can't keep the opposition from stacking the line against the run every time.

Sarkisian and Holt know how Pete Carroll thinks. Riley is coaching up Oregon State every year and has our number on offense. And Chip Kelly is showing just how much Oregon had to gain by Bellotti moving on, and how much mileage can be gained from creativity on offense.

Pete Carroll has given so much to us as USC fans, it kills me to even suggest that there's a need for some changes in how the team plays. But whether you want to characterize it as the rest of the conference catching up, or the Trojans being on a glide path, it sure looks like it's time to mix it up. I'd hate to see us end up like Florida State, still getting good athletes but having erratic results and a legendary coach staying too long.

Is it presumptuous of me to write the headline that I did? Sure, inasmuch as I'm not part of the team and for all I know this could just be an aberration. But recurring patterns rarely resolve themselves. I also know that the coaches and the players have it in them to prove me wrong. Here's hoping they can figure it out together.

Notre Dame Football - An Alternative Abridged History

DC Trojan — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 05:00:26 -0000

Late on the eve of the next installment in the USC - Notre Dame rivalry, it seems like time to take a good long look at our rivals. Sure we may tease them about getting shelled the last few years, and their resorting to getting misty eyed over their actual scholar athletes, but how much do any of you actually know about Notre Dame. I was certainly ignorant, and some of the things I found out were eye-opening to say the least. Torpedoes, nudists, money, Fibonacci numbers: this story has them all. Tally ho!

In the beginning...

The University of Notre Dame du Lac was founded in 1842 and eventually fielded a football team in 1887. By this time, the complete collapse of the French Second Republic during the Franco-Prussian War 17 years previously had caused some of the more astute members of the Notre Dame football team to be concerned about being seen as cheese-eating surrender monkeys, so they dropped the "du Lac" part of the name for public consumption, fearing that association with moist-to-soggy French mademoiselles would either inflame anti-Catholic sentiment or football players deprived of female companionship during the long Indiana nights. And so the stage was set for an early 20th century reign of terror...

Learning to deal with competition...

Notre Dame's first game was to the University of Michigan, which they lost, as indeed they did the following three times they attempted to beat the Wolverines. Between 1887 and 1913, the Notre Dame team played both collegiate and high school teams, a habit abandoned on the basis that colleges like Syracuse could generally provide respectable but hapless competition - a strategy that bore fruit until the Gerging of Charlie Weis in 2008.

Michigan refused to play Notre Dame between 1909 and 1942. Whatever moral ground that Michigan may have thought that they were occupying, they in fact handed the Notre Dame team their first opportunity to deploy the "snubbed by a team we could have beaten" theme that has allowed them to discount any losses to Michigan since 1942 on the grounds that Michigan isn't a real rival anyway and probably just got lucky on the day.

Nonetheless, Michigan football demonstrated sound thinking that day in 1909 when they decided to avoid Notre Dame. The Fighting Irish "respect" campaign led them to take on the likes of Army, Penn State, and Texas. Strange things began to happen to those teams though - Pancho Villa expanded his operations to include Texas, and Pennsylvania separatists attempted to annex College Station to West Virginia. No conclusive proof was found that Notre Dame was involved, but suspicions ran high because of the multi-year effort to stick it to Army.

That effort culminated with the sinking of the Lusitania by former Notre Dame exchange student and walk-on linebacker Kapitanleutnant Walther Schwieger. Schwieger's log entries typically started with references to being under the blue-gray sky, and while weather in the North Atlantic is generally pretty crap, it has been established that Schwieger used this phrase even on sunny days.

What has a U-Boat attack got to do with the Army football team, you might be asking. Well, the eventual result of the sinking of the Lusitania led to the US entry into World War I, which resulted in the machine-gunning of most of the Army team members who had thwarted Notre Dame's football team. Wolverines shuddered to think that it could have been them.

USC, the Hays Board, and the cinematic propaganda war...

The nicey-nicey version of the start of the rivalry between USC and Notre Dame is that Knute Rockne's wife was persuaded by the wife of the USC Athletic Director that going to Los Angeles every other year would be a jolly change from South Bend. Others suggest that the combination of cash-money for Notre Dame was pretty compelling, giving them a way to maintain their princpled objection to bowl games while pocketing serious cash - a canny eye on the bottom line underneath self-presentation that culminated in NBC setting back college football broadcasting roughly 6 times every fall. Still others suggest that Knute Rockne's friendship with new USC coach Howard Jones was the key.

In fact, all three were true, but not the whole story. Mrs Rockne did lobby for the trip to Los Angeles. A habitual naturist (as seen in this NSFW picture from their wedding), she was tired of the short sun-bathing season in Indiana, and tired also of the constant cover-ups (figurative and literal) by athletic department staff and mortified Jesuits. Knute Rockne did want to head to LA to play against his old buddy Jones, and saw a chance to pick up some cash while he did it - by reminding Notre Dame every year that USC had tried to hire him before Jones, and increased pay would be a plus. Notre Dame needed the appearance money to meet Rockne's salary demands, as well as for paying off photographers who hung around the Rockne yard trying to get compromising pictures of Mrs Rockne.

It was the perfect storm, but the missing detail is the threat of excommunication: Rockne was warned that the Jesuits hadn't forgotten the dark arts of the auto-da-fe, and a painful painful runup to being thrown out of the Church would result, if he ever forgot who was paying the bills and yielded to the siren call of coaching on the west coast.

At the same time, movies were becoming an ever more important part of popular culture. It seems curious to note that it was Notre Dame who had captured the popular imagination through this medium: thousands of kids who saw films with Irish ragamuffins in Hell's Kitchen crying out "just trow me da ball Fadder!" were the genesis of the Subway "alumni," and Knute Rockne even had a film made in his honor after he died... But where was USC? The film school had been founded in 1929, Buster Crabbe and John Wayne were getting into films, the university is in Los Angeles, and Fatty Arbuckle even lived near campus. Why the hell was USC not on the silver screen?

Once again, the Domers had outflanked the competition. By 1934, the Hays Code was being enforced, and it had been principally written by one Father Daniel Lord SJ (talk about a name driving your profession!) in 1930. There were three main principles:

No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.

Correct standards of life, subject only to the requirements of drama and entertainment, shall be presented.

Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation.

This was deep, deep cunning. What could be more lowering of moral standards than undercutting Notre Dame by letting those lapsed Methodists from Los Angeles show their football team in a good light? Nothing, that's what, with Catholic organizations spearheading the drive for removing moral laxity from the movie screens of America. And so, from a cinematic standpoint, USC became an unteam.

In fact, USC was so bamboozled by these years that when they eventually placed a football player into the popular culture, it was OJ Simpson, widely assumed to be a safe Negro until it emerged that his Hertz musings on getting out of town in a hurry foreshadowed his need to flee following his emergence as a homicidal lunatic. A university with 30 plus years of placing its football team in films would never have made that kind of mistake.

The End of Sabotage, Imposition of Numerological Strategy, and Surprise Results...

With the end of the Second World War, and the rise of the Cold War, the powers behind Notre Dame football concluded that it was time to enter a new era in confounding their opponents. The beginning of the end of the Hays Code with louche foreign films (imported by a splinter group from USC trying to bring down the Notre Dame film embargo on their team) reduced the tools at their disposal, and the election of President Kennedy and attendant anti-Catholic fear-mongering meant that using foreign agents and shadowy organizations were out of the question.

This made it imperative that the Notre Dame football structure put their money where their mouth was about being brighter than the average college athlete... and they came up with something cunning: using numerological cycles and occasionally posting counter-intuitive results so people stopped noticing the trends because of the recency effect.

Here's how it works: ever since 1941 the coaches produce results that either correlate to Fibonacci numbers or - when deemed necessary - cycles equivalent to 8.6 years / pi multiplied by 1,000 days. If the cycle is down, then there has to be a counter-intuitive positive result. If it's an up cycle, then the counter-intuitive result has to be negative. Sometimes there are sequential periods of success rather than a strict alternation of success and suckage.

When you look at it this way, the results almost fit - which makes sense, there has to be some deliberate variation to throw people off the scent. After all, the best evidence of a conspiracy is the absence of evidence! But after literally minutes of work with Excel, we can show that the results for Notre Dame football in the years since 1941 break out like this:

Coach Leahy had a tenure of 13 years, with good results: 13 is a Fibonacci number
Coaches Brennan and Kuharich each had 5 year tenures with bad results, but Paul Hornung won the Heisman: 5 is a Fibonacci number
Coaches Parseghian and Devine coached for a cumulative 17 years, which is just about two 8.6 year cycles, with good results, and threw people off the Fibonacci trail
Coach Faust coached for 5 years, with crap results, but started the 13 year streak of beating or tying with USC: 5 is again a Fibonacci number
Coach Holtz coached for 11 years, with good results, and produced the counter-intuitive result of losing his final game against USC, breaking the 13 game streak. Since Dr Lou doesn't do math as such, the 11 year tenure doesn't conform to anything, but the end of the streak against USC at 13 years kept a Fibonacci number in the mix despite his best efforts to defy the laws of mathematics and the iron law of the Athletic Department
Coach Davie produced 5 years of crap results, but beat SC and nearly beat Nebraska: another instance of the Fibonacci number 5 and counter-intuitive results
Coach Willingham produced some seriously crap results, and was out in 3 years: the administration had to drop him on the Fibonacci cycle or else be stuck with a guaranteed 2 more years of suck

And then we get to Charlie Weis, whose tenure thus far defies easy classification: he's in his fifth year, which would be a classic Fibonacci year to round out sequential crap results and get shitcanned, but the counter-intuitive games have been bad (Syracuse and Navy, for a start), and his contract is so long that he could theoretically have one crap period and one good period.

So how can someone make sense of this season? So far, it's been going well, which might mean that Notre Dame will lose against USC this year, to produce a result that doesn't go with the season. Or perhaps the tyranny of the long suck means that the season so far is the counter-intuitive result, and the Irish will lose tomorrow to wake up the echoes of the Brennan and Kuharich years. I just don't know which one it will be. Why oh why couldn't Dan Brown have turned his attention to this Catholic numerological mystery? WHY!?!?!?!??

It looks like we'll just have to wait and see what happens on the field.

Fight On, and beat the Irish (numerological conspiracy)!

Poll

So, just how convincing is this history of Notre Dame football?

Whatever, you couldn't be any more jealous of Notre Dame's tradition and academic prowess

8 votes

Did you know you're supposed to wait until the afternoon before the game to start drinking?

4 votes

I always suspected that Notre Dame had something to do with the First World War...

14 votes

Are you sure you're not Dan Brown?

2 votes

I'd have someone else start your car for the next few days, just in case

8 votes

36 votes | Poll has closed

Taylor Mays ran down Jahvid Best on 3rd and 1 for Cal - and when you see it in slow motion, it...

DC Trojan — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 05:10:29 -0000

Taylor Mays ran down Jahvid Best on 3rd and 1 for Cal - and when you see it in slow motion, it doesn't look like Mays anticipated the play, he just took off after Best. Just about anyone else who tried that would have had a good view of the back of Best's jersey as he headed for the end zone.

Trojans, Stafon Johnson in good spirits after freak accident

DC Trojan — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 22:30:22 -0000

Trojans, Stafon Johnson in good spirits after freak accident

Update on Stafon Johnson and his foray into twitter.

[UPDATED] An interesting read: Doc Saturday runs the numbers on SC

DC Trojan — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 20:54:44 -0000

Bumped...This should be fun! - P

Doc Saturday aka Matt Hinton looked at the stats for this year's team so far versus the 2004 through 2008 teams, and the results are interesting: this year's team looks really good on running yards and receiving yards.

However, as you might guess, the 3rd and 4th down conversion ratios, along with the turnovers, look like shit. Blown trips into the red zone don't help either.

Net result: the team is playing well at the play-by-play fundamentals. If they hang onto the ball better and increase their 3rd and 4th down conversions, they can get back to winning. After all, it only requires that you score more points than the opposition, right?

UPDATE...HP Fires Back. - P

You have to wonder if ‘Dr. Saturday’ is even watching the games, as he makes the case here that USC’s current offensive problems are basically about turnovers and penalties.

No mention that the numbers put up so far have been against the weakest part of the Trojan schedule. USC is averaging 19.3 ppg the last three games and if you take away that last drive against Ohio State in the final minutes, it falls to 16.6 for a unit that returned nine starters from 2008 (also, two of USC’s scores against WSU came off of an onside kick and a turnover inside the Cougar 30). The Trojans are one of the worst teams in the country at third down conversions. But why get into that? Much easier to slap some selective numbers together to ‘prove’ that the latest edition of the USC offense compares to recent ones.

Mmmmkay...let the fire works begin...

Rivalry Deferred

DC Trojan — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 03:46:41 -0000

Rivalry Deferred

A post wishing Stafon Johnson well, with many kind comments from the folks at Bruins Nation. I sincerely hope no Bruins suffer anything like that, but if they do, I know we'll respond in kind.

Stafon Johnson's fitness saved his life, doctor says

DC Trojan — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 20:33:38 -0000

Stafon Johnson's fitness saved his life, doctor says

From the LA Times.

Key details:

- Stafon Johnson already awake and communicating via writing and hand gestures.

- Trauma Director indicates that his existing fitness is probably what saved him.

- No timetable for recovery, Johnson remains under observation

Fight On Stafon!

An Alternative Take on the Press Going Nuts

DC Trojan — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 21:33:55 -0000

More photos » by Lori Shepler - AP

Browse more photos »

Minor editorial note: this is actually a joint post from me and Paragon.

People just kill me...

I love all the concern trolls out in the media (and elsewhere) who have now decided that it is time to turn on Pete Carroll after Saturday's loss in Seattle.

For the past 6-7 years the press has suckled at the USC teat for every little drop of wisdom that Pete Carroll had for them. They would shower him with praise and practically fall over waiting for the next word he would utter. They would marvel at the talent he amassed, talked about dynasties and the greatest team ever, and when USC lost a game here or there it was like the sky was falling or the earth had moved off its axis. Something had gone wrong in the natural order of things.

But now the tone has changed. The press has decided that the trend of SC dropping a game against an unranked conference opponent - which any basically sentient college football fan has noticed for some time - is proof that they were wrong: Pete Carroll isn't a genius, he's a fraud. He's underachieving. He's not perfect.

There are several ways that this shows up. The first is the tack taken by the local press, which makes a sharp shift from glowing admiration to personal criticism based on rumors and bias. The most typical criticisms are that he is a control freak or a stubborn SOB who can't recognize when he's wrong. In that case, I say big deal: he's a college football head coach - being stubborn or a control freak comes with the territory. Maybe success has made it worse, but that doesn't mean any other coach is different, and it doesn't mean that Carroll is generally doing it wrong. I could care less how Urban Meyer does it. I could care less how that clown in South Bend does it. Their way works for them...good for them!

Another way that this shows up is people arguing that Carroll hasn't been able to win a national championship without Norm Chow, and that Carroll's insistence on bringing along Sarkisian and Kiffin has meant that SC has become both predictable with playcalling and inconsistent on results. It might be that Chow is the missing link on a team that's always there for defense but not quite as hot on offense... but Chow didn't set the NFL on fire at Tennessee, and he's having a hell of a time igniting the offense at UCLA, a team that's recruiting good players and has a stout defense (sound familiar?). Even current members of the USC fan base who have a national voice can't get over the loss of Chow. But at best we'd be talking about Chow making the difference on a handful of games - maybe. These are still college kids we're talking about here.

All of this is like a gift to our rival fan base (among others). Certain little Gutties hate Pete Carroll with a passion, so much that they write about him incessantly, looking for anything that will mock or chide his style at the same time that their coach does everything to emulate him.

So for all of this, why would any kid want to play for Pete Carroll at USC? Are they all deluded too?

No. Here are the things that are still true about Pete Carroll and the teams he fields at USC:

Pete Carroll still puts a great product on the field, in terms of talent
USC still plays in big games, and wins out of conference. People may say that SC only wins because OOC teams don't know their tendencies, last time I checked they have film rooms in Columbus, Charlottesville, Blacksburg, etc.
USC is in the mix every year. Do the preseason rankings match the quality of the teams every year? Probably they are over-optimistic, but not by a big difference
SC still gets good recruits, despite being loaded at some positions
SC has been dominating the conference
SC puts players in the NFL

These are all things that players care about, and results that fans should care about. They aren't small, and I'm going to focus on two: conference play and players getting drafted.

For all the talk about individual teams beating SC, only two have consistently been in the mix as challengers, Oregon and Cal. Oregon State may have SC's number but they fell apart last year, and once isn't enough. If Pete Carroll sucks so much, how come SC has won or split the conference championship seven years in a row? Cal was supposed to be on the rise after they beat SC in 2003, and even with a fantastic coach like Tedford this is the first year they can really start to think about Pasadena in January. Oregon's run for the Roses turned out to be dependent on Dennis Dixon's ACL, which was good luck in recruiting that turned to bad luck with an injury. If Pete Carroll sucks, how come people have complained that SC was making the rest of the conference look bad for seven years? Hint: it's not because the other teams had no talent and no coaches.

As for players getting drafted: any kids looking to play at a big-time program have a dream about playing in the NFL - that's the gold standard. And players know that playing in a high-visibility, high-winning percentage team gives them a good chance to get there. So far, when players don't go to SC, it's not because they think that playing there will prevent them from making it to the next level or because they think that Carroll is some kind of delusional control freak.

The loss to UW certainly pissed me off and disappointed me in many ways. I have some questions and concerns, and while my voice means nothing in Heritage Hall, I'm not going to turn on a dime and against the coach. I will take it over what I have seen the last few years in the rest of the conference...always the bridesmaid and never the bride. Is it frustrating to see us not go to national championship games? Sure, but flawed or not, we have the system we have and everyone knows you need to be just about goddamn perfect to get there. Do I care about rivals getting all excited? No, win something then you can gloat.

What I do care about is when members of the traditional media like the insufferable Matt Hayes make comments about Pete Carroll criticizing the play Aaron Corp like he did this week. I find it comical that the press wants the truth but when the truth is put forth the person telling the truth is roudly criticized for what they say. I mean did Hayes watch the same game we did? Corp was terrible and Pete Carroll did nothing more than confirm what we all saw...with facts.

Pete Carroll could be his own worst enemy but so far he hasn't self destructed. Maybe he will at some point...who knows, but until that day I will continue to support him and his accomplishments. I'm not turning on a dime because of one game this season or the other seasons. Those who see it different are more than welcome to walk the path that they choose.