Trojans’ Season Down to Save-Hackett Mode

What a week for Los Angeles. First the NFL robber barons said we won’t be getting an expansion team, and now the big-time college football season is effectively over.

Here it is, not even midway through October and the USC and UCLA are all but eliminated from the Rose Bowl race.

USC bowed out in the desert Saturday with a 31-24 loss to Arizona. That gave the Trojans a 3-2 record, 1-2 in the Pacific 10 Conference. The Bruins (3-3, 1-2) were set back a week earlier at Arizona State, and they almost gave away another one Saturday night against Oregon.

It’s getting to the point where the most compelling reason to watch these teams is to see what methods they’ll devise to blow leads.

You might also want to watch the skies over the Coliseum, just to see if there are any vultures circling with an eye on Paul Hackett.

All of a sudden this is shaping up as a critical time period for the coach of a team with a very impatient fan base. It’s Notre Dame Week. And the Irish are coming off their best showing of the season, a 48-17 pounding of Arizona State that evened their record at 3-3.

If the Trojans win only two more games all year, they had better be against Notre Dame and UCLA. If they go 4-2 the rest of the way and lose to those two it will be considered a wasted season.

The Times sports department received its first “Fire Hackett” letter before he even coached a game last season. Some fan was angry that he had suspended R. Jay Soward for the opener for class-related reasons. You’d better believe the mailbox will be overflowing if he loses this week.

To get a sample I went online Sunday and checked out a Trojan fan chat room in the wake of Saturday’s loss. It wasn’t pretty. People who had previously supported Hackett were writing in to apologize. After one fan gave the coaching staff an “F” for Saturday’s game, another wrote in to say that grade was too high.

It’s not fair to judge a college coach until he has had four full recruiting classes, enough time to completely implement his system with his players.

But the early returns haven’t been promising. What little identity this team has is its propensity to commit penalties.

Sooner or later Trojan folks will have to realize that USC will never return to the exalted status of its past. No college football team can. Not Notre Dame or Alabama or any other onetime powerhouse. There’s too much parity these days and too many televised games for any team to generate a mystique. Watching a team play with all of its apparent flaws is a lot less intimidating than reading a Grantland Rice account of its glory.

It appears that Ohio State has come to a comfortable acceptance of that because it keeps extending John Cooper’s contract even though he hasn’t delivered a national championship despite a program that’s constantly stacked with NFL talent. They re-upped him again this week.

At least Cooper has made runs at the Rose Bowl and the national championship. It would take a quantum leap for Hackett and the Trojans to reach that level.

What USC can do in the near future is shed its reputation as a team that beats itself, or allows opponents every opportunity to do the job themselves.

It would help if they at least looked like an offensive juggernaut.

Sometimes when a coordinator is promoted to a head coach he spends so much time attending to all the duties of his new position that he doesn’t have enough time to devote to his specialty. Hackett’s Trojans have done nothing to reflect on his reputation as an offensive whiz.

His team has averaged 35.4 points, with no fewer than 24 in a game. But almost a third of the team’s touchdowns (seven of 23) have been scored by the defense or special teams.

Two of the worst rushing games in the school’s history have come under Hackett’s watch: a record minus-23 yards showing against Texas Christian in the Sun Bowl and minus-20 yards Saturday.

There are built-in excuses for Hackett. Valid ones. His top quarterback is sidelined because of a broken collarbone. The defense is young. One offensive lineman after another went down Saturday. His game-breaking player was knocked out cold.

But that’s often when coaches make names for themselves, when the situation looks bleak. Atlanta Brave Manager Bobby Cox received more kind words this season than ever before, primarily because his team kept winning despite key injuries and some struggles by his normally reliable star pitchers.

One and a half seasons is not enough time to reach a definitive conclusion that Hackett can’t coach. But, for his sake, it would be a good time for him to start showing he can.

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J.A. Adande can be reached at his e-mail address: [email protected]

UP NEXT

USC vs.

NOTRE DAME

Saturday,

11:30 a.m.

TV: Channel 4

USC REPORT

Despite a concussion, R. Jay Soward is expected to be able to play against the Irish on Saturday. Page 9