USC had a terrible 2018. The Trojans went 5-7, the worst they’ve done since putting up an identical record in 2000. When the 2000 team sputtered, continuing a three-year decline under Paul Hackett, it led to the coach’s firing. USC hired Pete Carroll to replace him, and two or so years later, the Trojans were firmly perched as one of the sport’s best programs.
The Trojans’ days of national contention are not over. That’s not how it works when a program has USC’s tradition and is located in ultra-talented Los Angeles. But everything that’s happened since that awful 2018 season ended has only made USC look farther away from getting back to Pac-12 contention, let alone anything beyond that.
1. Clay Helton didn’t get fired.
As recently as the week leading up to Thanksgiving, coaches around the sport thought Helton would be fired if the Trojans lost their finale at home to undefeated Notre Dame. They did, but AD Lynn Swann announced shortly thereafter that Helton would keep his job.
It’s possible Helton rights the ship at some point. In 2016, he won nine games in a row after installing Sam Darnold as his starting QB, and USC won the Rose Bowl. In 2017, he won 11 games and got to a New Year’s Six bowl (which he lost to Ohio State). None of this was that long ago, and at points during those years, Helton seemed like the right guy for the gig.
Swann could point to those pretty good recent seasons as reason to keep Helton. But he’s failed to make USC a dominant force even in the Pac-12 South, which he’s won once in three years as the full-time coach. It was surprising that going 5-7 didn’t get him fired.
2. Helton turned over his staff of assistant coaches, but the centerpiece of that transition left after a month.
Kliff Kingsbury was an amazing offensive coordinator hire. The fired Texas Tech coach is an offensive whiz, and USC landed him in early December to fix a unit that struggled with five-star freshman JT Daniels at QB. This appeared to be a match made in heaven.
But Kingsbury got a better offer. The NFL, lusting after college spread offense, came calling, and he did what almost anyone would do, taking over the Cardinals as head coach.
3. Swann embarrassed USC as Kingsbury was leaving by trying to deny him the chance to interview with NFL teams.
USC had that contractual right. But it’s typical in coaching for teams to let assistants interview for jobs that would represent promotions in the industry. Instead, Kingsbury had to resign from USC to talk to the Cardinals, per the team president. Arizona ultimately covered Kingsbury’s $150,000 buyout.
This isn’t the biggest of USC’s problems at the moment, but Swann might have made USC a less attractive place to work for future assistant candidates. If a coach has ambitions to get a bigger job somewhere, would he want to work for an AD who’s shown he’s not always OK with coaches pursuing such things? Given Helton’s struggles, it might matter soon.
4. In the midst of Kingsbury’s brief tenure as OC, the Trojans signed an uncharacteristically lowly rated recruiting class, which is taking on water now that he’s gone.
The average USC class over the previous four years ranked fifth in the country on the 247Sports Composite. Only Alabama and Ohio State averaged better.
This USC class is ranked 14th. That includes two blue-chips who haven’t actually signed Letters of Intent. One is four-star receiver Kyle Ford, who committed after the Early Signing Period, thinking he’d be playing for Kingsbury. He’s free to go elsewhere if he wants, and given that he’s the No. 6 receiver in the class, he has many options.
The No. 1 athlete in the class, five-star SoCal native Bru McCoy, did sign his scholarship papers. But he’s already in the transfer portal, with Texas seemingly a strong candidate.
USC blog Conquest Chronicles says:
The McCoy news adds to the drama that has hit USC through out the month. With recruits decommitting and Kingsbury departure to name the few, things are not looking so great at the university at all levels. You start to wonder and question the job that Lynn Swann and Clay Helton is doing at USC. Once again another black eye to the USC Football program and just weeks before National Signing Day.
McCoy and Ford are the highest-rated players in USC’s class (or sort of in it).
If USC’s class finished ranked 14th, it’d be the lowest ranking for a Trojans signing class in the history of recruiting rankings. Effectively, it could be much worse than that, even if you count McCoy as a transfer and not a standard decommitment.
(The Trojans also officially lost the No. 7 safety in the 2017 class, Bubba Bolden. He’d been suspended since around the start of the 2018 season and transferred to Miami.)
USC’s upside remains huge. But it’s been a long time since the Trojans were this bad, either on the field or in recruiting.
The 2019 non-conference schedule includes Fresno State, a road game with BYU, and a road game with Notre Dame. The Pac-12 slate has a visit to Washington and a home game against Oregon in cross-divisional play. Things could get worse before they get better.