USC fires Clay Helton 2 games into 7th season in charge
Clay Helton’s unlikely tenure as the head football coach at Southern California began bizarrely and lasted far longer than almost anybody expected.
The folksy Southerner won a Rose Bowl and a Pac-12 title early on, but he never won over most of the Trojans’ fans.
After one more embarrassing defeat for a school desperate to add to its 11 national championships, USC finally moved on.
Helton was fired on Monday,
two games into his seventh season in charge. Athletic director Mike Bohn made the move two days after a 42-28 home loss to Stanford that sent the Trojans plummeting out of the AP Top 25.
“I think that in the end, it’s just a sense of ensuring that long-term, we have the ability to build,” said Bohn, who took over the athletic department in November 2019. “I think we’ve made some nice progress in the time that Clay and I worked together. I enjoyed working with Clay. He’s an incredible person, and we did some neat things . ... But I think that we’re committed to winning national championships, and we believe that in order to do that, a change was needed.”
Helton thanked USC’s leaders and his assistant coaches and players in a statement posted on his social media accounts.
“While it will be hard to not be in the fight with you, I am confident that great things lie ahead,” said Helton, who went 46-24 at USC. “As you compete for a championship, no one will be cheering louder than the Helton family.”
Donte Williams, the Trojans’ cornerbacks coach and associate head coach, is taking over for the rest of the season alongside offensive coordinator Graham Harrell and defensive coordinator Todd Orlando.
Williams, a Los Angeles-area native, becomes the first Black head coach in USC football history. He joined the program in 2020 from Oregon, and he has played a major role in the Trojans’ recruiting advancements over the past two cycles.
USC (1-1, 0-1 Pac-12) visits Washington State this weekend for its road opener.
The 39-year-old Williams called his promotion “the opportunity of a lifetime.” He didn’t find out about the administration’s plans until moments before Helton and Bohn broke the news jointly to the players.
“We have a lot of games left, but the season has started,” Williams said. “It’s hard to make, I guess, huge changes right now, so my biggest thing is about enhancing everything we do . ... Everyone in this organization needs to do something a little bit (more) than what they were doing before, including myself.”
Helton finished 22 games over .500 during the seventh-longest coaching tenure in the history of a longtime West Coast college football powerhouse. He took over as USC’s interim coach before permanently getting his first head coaching job late in the 2015 season.
While Helton brought stability to a tumultuous football culture and ran a clean program, he never won over a significant portion of the Trojans’ vast fan base, even during his early success. Helton’s genteel manner didn’t inspire confidence in fans used to Pete Carroll’s intensity, while his Texas twang and aw-shucks style often seemed out of place in Los Angeles.