Southern Cal, Clay Helton are No. 1 on Misery Index
Southern Cal should construct a big digital display board at the entrance to campus, similar to the national debt clock near Bryant Park in New York City. Only at USC, it should count backward every day on the amount of money owed to Clay Helton for the remainder of his contract.
Although the true number has never been made public because USC is a private school, the contract extension Helton signed after the 2017 season was known within the industry to be absurd – with a buyout somewhere initially in the $20 million range, even though Helton was not really winning at a USC level or being pursued by better offers.
All in all, it was one last failure of vision and leadership from an era when USC allowed people like Pat Haden and Lynn Swann, who had no interest in doing the actual work of an athletic director, to run the show. And it was immediately clear that Helton, who has been on the hot seat pretty much since the day he got the job full time, wasn’t going anywhere for a while.
But as the years have passed, the cost of making a coaching change has become more manageable for USC. Meanwhile, the new leadership in that athletic department, led by Mike Bohn, can sleep well at night knowing they’ve given Helton, who is well-liked personally, every opportunity to succeed.
But when you see losses like Saturday, when the Trojans got blown off the field by Stanford 42-28, it seems like only a matter of time before the inevitable becomes reality.
The key stat from this game? Nine penalties for 111 yards, which has been a consistent theme of the Helton era. Not only have the Trojans been flat-out not good enough against the really good teams on their schedule, they’re consistently undisciplined.
In 2019, they had the 14th-most penalty yards per game in the country. In 2018, the eighth most. In 2017, the ninth most.
And the fact that USC flopped this quickly against Stanford, a team that scored seven points in a season-opening loss to Kansas State, puts the Trojans at No. 1 on this week’s Misery Index, a weekly measurement of knee-jerk reactions based on what each fan base just watched.
Here are the others that made the index.
Florida State: The Seminoles never needed to officially lose to low-level competition to prove how dysfunctional their program was. Sure, there were near-misses against the likes of Samford in 2018 and Louisiana-Monroe in 2019, which very much contributed to the overall vibe of incompetence around former coach Willie Taggart. But to sink far enough that Florida State could actually drop one of these games?
That’s new, and it happened Saturday on second-year coach Mike Norvell’s watch in a 20-17 loss to Jacksonville State when the Gamecocks (not the SEC variety) completed a 59-yard touchdown pass as time expired. This loss smacks of a program celebrating a bit too hard last week for getting to overtime against Notre Dame in the season opener. Still, even with a hangover, the Seminoles made way too many mental mistakes and should’ve managed more than 133 passing yards against an FCS team that lost 31-0 to UAB last week. Unless something changes soon, the Seminoles are headed down the Tennessee/Nebraska path of former powers flailing around for answers as they find new depths to rock bottom.
Texas: One of the most important lessons of every college football season is that Week 1, for better or worse, is a mirage. Some teams are going to look way better than they actually will turn out to be, and a lot of teams are going to look way worse. The truth starts to emerge in Week 2, when coaches have to go back to work and make adjustments, when the entire game-day process starts to normalize and when there’s film out there for opponents to look at.
Coming out of its opener – a very solid win over Louisiana-Lafayette – the narrative about Texas was how much more organized and offensively potent it looked under Steve Sarkisian than the previous regime led by Tom Herman. The narrative now? Let’s just say the Longhorns don’t quite look ready to make the jump to the SEC that’s coming at some point in the next few years. Arkansas completely manhandled Texas 40-21, rushing for 333 yards while Texas had just 256 total. Though it would be rational to say, “It’s just one game,” Texas doesn’t do rational. It’s never done rational. Sark is going to get plenty of opportunities to fix this program, but unless Texas goes on to have an exceptional year, there’s going to be a big neon sign flashing “ARKANSAS” over his head for the next couple of years.
Washington: During the current century, the only stretch of time Washington has been good at football came in a three-year burst under Chris Petersen. That’s just the unfortunate fact of the matter for the Huskies, and yet Petersen raised the bar so significantly that when he stepped down, expectations of contending for Pac-12 titles were going to fall on his successor. Jimmy Lake, who had been with Petersen at Boise State and during his entire Washington run, turned out to be that guy.
Given all the craziness surrounding last season, and the fact that Washington only played four games due to COVID-19, this is the first real look at the program under Lake. And already, it looks like some changes are necessary. Washington, which started the season ranked No. 21, is now 0-2 after a seasonopening loss to Montana and a noncompetitive 31-10 effort at Michigan. From the moment the hire was made, Lake choosing John Donovan as offensive coordinator after his questionable work at Penn State looked like a potential issue. But it’s been even worse than expected, as the Huskies failed to crack 300 yards against Montana and only did so against Michigan with some fourthquarter drives after the game was already out of hand.