Down day at work, looked up the USC message board. Pulled this solid post:
"All of USC's failed coaches have had the game that strips away all doubt and allows all but the most dyed-in-the-wool delusionists in our fan base (i.e., someone who has recently argued that Jim Harbaugh and Bill Snyder are mediocre but Sark shows real promise) to see that we're headed to a necessary coaching change. Hackett and Kiffin both had humiliating home losses to Washington State. Sark -- either because he doesn't "get USC" traditions as much as Pat Haden thinks, or because the schedulers did not give him the opportunity -- chose to mix it up and have his exposure game against the other Washington school, a pedestrian Husky squad with a crappy freshman QB who couldn't hit the broad side of a barn. Understand, these exposure games don't cause a coach to fail. Failure is inevitable when you don't have the skill set to succeed. They just let everybody know what's coming. These are the games where the failed USC coach shows the whole world why he can't succeed.
For Sark, it's the softness at the core of his coaching philosophy (or personality) that spells his doom. Holding a stable of good backs and facing an opponent that could not stop the run, Mr. "Bully Mentality" refused to commit to the run game, exposing all of his preseason talk as the empty bluster many of us suspected. Note to Sark, just in case you're perusing the message boards while sipping a well-deserved adult beverage, when you're calling plays for Northern Illinois in two years, and you're facing a team that can't stop your running game, cram it down their freakin' throats. You know, like David Shaw did to you a couple of weeks ago. Or like USC used to do with good coaches. Hell, even Paul Hackett would have committed to the run last night.
So we're headed towards an inevitable coaching change, one that frankly was inevitable since the day Pat Haden hired a guy who was barely holding onto his job at another conference school, and who was not getting a sniff of attention from any other real football programs. The only thing left in the air now is how many players' careers have to be damaged before the plug is pulled. Being that Pat Haden is still in charge, we can expect it to be handled with the most-possible ineptitude. After all, it was his decision to wait half a year too long to fire Kiffin that gave us the revolving-door interim coach season and set back a full year the program's rebuilding efforts. Not to mention the actual logistics of the firing were so absurd that Haden temporarily turned Lane Kiffin -- Lane Kiffin! -- into an object of sympathy. So he'll undoubtedly wait too long and then handle the necessary task with typical clumsiness.
And then what? I suppose that depends on whether Pat Haden has the class to resign and give up a job he was never prepared to take. If he does, this program we love has a fighting chance. If not ... well, I don't want to talk about what happens if not. Let's just say that if you consistently get rotten food and lousy service from a restaurant, you should have a pretty good idea what you're getting if you go back again.
In the meantime, I'll be taking my 9-year-old son to South Bend this week. This is my 8th trip; his first. Because I want him to have great memories of his first trip to Notre Dame, I'm going to go all-in on the stuff surrounding the game and downplay the significance of the outcome of the game itself. What choice do I have? Soft, undisciplined football teams rarely walk into South Bend without getting their teeth kicked in. It could be a rough evening."
