Pete’s on the Hot Seat

So not only do my Trojans lose because they were too big and strong to tackle a pint-sized running back who managed to make playing a #1 ranked football team look a lot like that scene in Ratatoullie where Remy is scurrying about the kitchen underfoot, barely avoiding calamity and miraculously saving the soup…

I also wake up this morning to find out my bank went bellyup, got seized by the government, and was sold off to JPMorgan Chase leaving all of EstablishTheRun’s startup capital for his burrito stand flying in the wind. Don’t talk to me about FDIC insurance. They’ve only got $45.2 billion in that fund, Wamu banks more than $30 bill and Wachovia’s about to go under. Why am I talking about all this you might ask?

Because it’s a crisis. We all know our financial system’s in the tank. We also know Henry Paulson is about to ride to the rescue atop a $700,000,000,000 steed. A lot of whiners are up in arms about this, saying we should let the market deal with it, and that tax payer money shouldn’t be used to bail out the Suits who spent our 401(k)s helping burger-flippers buy a McMansion in Malibu. I say quit your whining! At least Henry Paulson’s doing something about the financial crisis, which is a lot more than can be said about Steve Sample and our current crisis.

For those of you who aren’t passionate enough about USC football to recognize that guy on the right, that’s Steve Sample, the president of USC. I know that some people would say he’s an exceptional leader and that he’s turned USC into an academic powerhouse, a powerful social and cultural force, and a sports juggernaut. In fact, in a previous post, your very own Trojan prophet described him as a “…brilliant school president”. I stand corrected. Steve Sample has failed us.

Just like all those so-called ‘Pollyannas’ who accurately predicted the sub-prime mortgage mess, there have been Trojans (namely me and my co-blogger) who were willing to say what everyone was thinking but no one was saying: “Pete Carroll can only be counted on to win 11 games a year” Sadly, we’ve been ignored and vilified and our prophecies fell on deaf ears. And Sample’s administration sat on its hands, doing nothing to prevent last night’s catastrophe. Sample was either asleep at the wheel or too busy counting Pete’s trophies in Heritage Hall to realize that the wheels were coming off that bus he keeps falling asleep while driving.

And now when the sky is falling, where is his bailout plan? At least Paulson has woken up. He recognizes the need to do away with free market enterprise and throw money at the problem. But Mr. Sample is apparently content to stand pat, to give Pete another chance. Well then what exactly are we doing with that $3.7 billion endowment? We’re certainly not winning BCS National Championship trophies more than once every few years. Do the math.

No one is more responsible for our Trojan’s ability to make it to a record 6 straight BCS bowls but having only two and a half of those games actually matter than Pete Carroll and no one is more responsible for Pete Carroll making it to all those BCS games and only winning one and a half national titles than Steven B. Sample. So, Steve, listen up. Unless you want me and Don’tBendDon’tBreak to change the name of this blog to “Steven’s on the Steamin’ Divan” or “Steve’s Got Us Peeved” and start calling for your resignation, you need to step up and show some freakin’ LEADERSHIP. USC is in a free fall. All of our worst fears have come to pass. It frankly can’t get any worse than having to resort to an onside kick and losing to a Pac 10 team by TWO field goals (almost ONE touchdown) because some guy name ‘Jacuzzi’ kept running between our legs. In order to avoid finding out if it can get any worse and suffering a total USC meltdown, we need action, and we need it fast. There’s no time for oversight from the Board of Directors or any sort of action reflecting the will of the students and alumni, Steve, it’s time to get up on that $3.7 billion dollar horse you fund raised your butt off for and LEAD OUR UNIVERSITY.

In case you didn’t bother to write up a plan to lead the University of Southern California back to glory, I’ll do you a favor and spell out exactly the plan you need enact:

1. Put Pete Carroll on double-whammy, no-take-backs probation, effectively immediately. If we either: 1) allow another team to score multiple touchdowns, 2) score less than 50 points in any game, or 3) win the stupid Rose Bowl one more time, he’s fired, on the spot. “Bye Pete, thanks for one and a half national championships, three Heismans, six straight Pac 10 titles… oh, and fifteen losses and four straight (probably) non-championships and a whole lot of nothing!”

2. The coaching search needs to begin immediately and in earnest and as soon as it begins it needs to end, because it begins and ends with Norm Chow. I think we all knew that when Pete let Norm go he was also letting go of our dreams of yearly national championships. It’s no surprise that we’ve only won one Heisman trophy without him. I don’t care what UCLA’s paying him. We’ve got almost $4 billion to work with. Which brings me to the most critical part of the rescue plan and the part that’s sure to get me more than a little flak.

3. We’re not spending enough on our football program. We need better facilities, better accommodations, better equipment. Something. Because year after year we keep losing out on a couple blue chip recruits, and those recruits can make the difference between a number one ranked recruiting class and a number one ranked team. That won’t lose to unranked Pac 10 pansies. I know it takes time to build our endowment, so there’s only one realistic answer: we need to cut spending. What athletic programs are under performing? Cut them. Which sports aren’t packing the stands? Sell the stands. We can’t keep pouring money into the failing programs just because they’ve been successful in the past. We all know there’s only one sport that really matters and that’s college football. Michael Phelps apparently goes to Michigan and does anyone care about him? No! They care that the ‘Worst-erines’ lost to Notre Dame. NCAA athletics are a business, plain and simple, and the athletic department’s program bloat is ruining our ROI. Cut your losses Sample, stand up to Mike Garrett, or better yet, fire him, because his Heisman isn’t helping anyone right now. Look, I’m not saying to shutter the baseball team. I know they’ve won 12 national championships but I also know that they haven’t won one since 1998 and they haven’t won 5 in a row since the 70’s. Maybe sell some bats. What about our basketball team? These days they’re more famous for their recruiting than their performance and they’ve never been as good as UCLA’s Men’s BB team. (one of USC athletics’ biggest failures) So why do they need that fancy new Galen center? It’s these kind of entitlement programs that threaten to bankrupt our university and prevent us from facing the modern challenges of playing NCAA football in an era of incredible parity. You don’t have to start by cutting the men’s baseball or men’s basketball programs, but how about the women’s teams? Or maybe the Cross Country squad? Something’s got to give. No one likes cutting athletic programs and telling our athletes they lost their scholarships. But no one likes losing a college football game almost every year either.

That’s the plan. It’s not pretty. But it will work if we act decisively and immediately to avoid further disaster. Steven, you’ve done a lot of good for our university so I’m giving you one last chance to get our football program back to greatness. Put Carroll on the ultra-hot Habanero seat, get Norm Chow back, and spend at least another $150 million on the football program every year. It will work, it has too. I can’t take many more Stanfords and Texas’s and Oregon States. Today at work all my colleagues were trying to make me feel better about the game, saying that it’s better to lose early rather than lose late. Well you know what Steve? It’s better not to lose at all.

Finally, to address the controversy hurricane currently swirling on our comment boards: I know Pete Carroll’s been pretty good. I know that’s enough for some of you, but it’s not enough for us. Deal with it. A lot of people say “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.” Well I say, “Sometimes you should look a gift horse in the mouth, because sometimes maybe it’s not a gift horse but a Trojan horse and there are people hiding in there waiting to attack as soon as you open the gates.” Pete might seem like our savior, but he’s not. There’s nothing more dangerous than blind loyalty to failed leadership. Don’t be sheep Trojans. Don’t be sheep.

If Washington Mutual can fail, what makes you think the USC Federal Credit Union isn’t next?

“Nothing special.”

That’s how the Boyish One described USC’s performance last Saturday in our over-hyped matchup with Ohio State. For once Pete and I couldn’t agree more.

For those of us who demand excellence from Mr. $4.4 million there was nothing special about the Men of Troy hanging less than 40 points on a defense missing TWO starters from last year’s team, at home, on national television. ‘Special’ isn’t a word I would use to describe a punchless running attack that never found paydirt, only averaged a little over five yards a carry, and did nothing to resolve the Trojans’ crippling running back controversy (more on this in a later post).

This game represented an unprecedented opportunity for Coach Carroll to tell an indifferent nation that USC was back, and that after three frustrating years in the cellar of the Bowl Championship Series, we deserve another chance in the big show, a chance to play for the ADT Security Services National Championship Trophy rather than have to settle for another^[1] irrelevant engraving on an ancient trophy from yesteryear’s formerly prestigious Rose Bowl game.