Reggie Who? USC Removes All Public Displays of Bush, Mayo

It was going to take some major to get Your Face is a Sports Blog out of hibernation, and the hiring of Pat Haden as the new USC athletic director is about as big as it gets. While I have some concerns about hiring someone with zero experience in athletic administration, I’m generally OK with it. If you didn’t know, Haden was a Rhodes Scholar, which is something you’ll be hearing referenced a million times this year. He’s also earned a reputation as one of the classiest and most decent people in college football (as evidenced by Bill Dwyre’s sloppy wet kiss in the Los Angeles Times).

It’s obvious why Haden was the right choice for the job right now. He knows USC intimately but wasn’t involved in the recent scandals which have seriously dented the athletic department. If nothing else, the USC athletic program should be run ethically and with dignity, a complete 180-degree turn from the Machiavellian nature of the Mike Garrett tenure. His hiring sends a clear message to the NCAA that the school is serious about cleaning house as it appeals the severity of the sanctions slapped on the football program.

Clearly, new USC President Max Nikias is putting his stamp on the athletic department, and Garrett’s “retirement” is hardly a surprise. But Haden’s hiring is far from the only change coming to the athletic department. A memo sent to all USC employees today shows that the university is willing to go to great lengths to rehabilitate its image - and distance itself from the two players who were at the center of the athletic department’s fall from grace.

Buried at the end of the announcement of Garrett’s departure and Haden’s hiring is the news that the school is removing all public displays involving Reggie Bush and O.J. Mayo before incoming students arrive in August. This includes removing Bush’s 2005 Heisman Trophy statue from Heritage Hall and returning it to the Heisman Trust.

The memo from President Nikias states that the “Trojan Family honors and respects the USC sporting careers of persons whose actions did not compromise their athletic program or the opportunities of future USC student-athletes.” Ouch. Depending on how you look at it, USC is either attempting to wipe the slate clean or conducting a hand-washing of Pontius Pilate proportions. The university has cleared decided to back away from the defiant nature struck by Garrett and Pete Carroll in the immediate aftermath of the sanctions and turned to Plan B: douse everything in bleach and start over.

In addition to pretending that Reggie Bush and O.J. Mayo never existed, USC is also creating a new position to oversee the athletic department from the outside. They have hired high-powered Los Angeles lawyer (and former Small College All-American football player) David Roberts to fill the role of vice president for athletic compliance. This position will report to senior vice president of administration Todd Dickey and not the athletic department. Essentially, Roberts will serve as an “outside” source of oversight for the athletic department.

So in case you were wondering: you’ll apparently be able to see O.J. Simpson’s retired number at the Coliseum this fall but not Reggie Bush’s. With the resources of the school’s film program, I wouldn’t be shocked if they tried to digitally alter old game footage to replace Reggie Bush with a generic “RB #5” like from an EA Sports College Football game. The university is apparently very serious about sending the message to the NCAA that is changing the culture of its athletic department (and also apparently willing to make people like Bush, Mayo and Garrett into scapegoats). Whether it makes a difference remains to be seen.

Read the memo here.

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Posted by The Duke of Everything at 1:56 PM 0 comments  

...Or How I Learned to Stop Thinking and Love the Lingerie Football League

Image via Wikipedia

In sports, there’s a level of inverse proportionality that usually comes into play - the more hype there is surrounding an event, the more lackluster it usually becomes. The big fight is a bust, the must-see national title game turns into a blowout…sporting events rarely meet your expectations, much less exceed them. But on Friday night, I not only had my expectations exceeded but exploded like Neil Sedaka guesting on SCTV’s “Farm Film Report”: it blowed up good - real good! And I have the Lingerie Football League to thank for it.

Yes, that Lingerie Football League - the one that’s an off-shoot of the games played during halftime of the Super Bowl. I went to a game at the Los Angeles Coliseum on Friday night expecting tits and ass. But what I got was a lot more - tits and ass, PLUS more hard hits than I saw when USC was playing at the Coliseum all last season. It was a revelatory experience, kind of like when The Whizzer gets struck out by Roy Hobbes in the beginning of “The Natural” - except with more boobs (and thankfully, 100 percent less Joe Don Baker).

The league has ten teams, with only one game a week being played on Friday nights. (Imagine if the NFL was Monday Night Football and nothing else - except with more ass crack.) Last Friday night was the regular season finale, with the hometown Los Angeles Temptation needing to beat the San Diego Seduction in order to make it to the conference finals later this week and a chance at the LFL Finals -played during halftime of the Super Bowl at a Hooters in Florida. I think. (Frankly, it was all pretty confusing.)

The league plays seven-on-seven and the rules are like a tackle version of the intramural flag football league you played in during college. The neutral zone appears to be about three yards wide and players can’t line up within a certain width of the ball. (For a more complete description, consult your nearest LFL Rules Book.) As you can tell, I wasn’t that discriminating of a fan coming into it - I had heard through a friend about the game several months ago, then was reminded of it a couple of hours before the 9 p.m. kickoff. A couple of phone calls to find someone else willing to go with me (because going to a Lingerie Football League game alone is basically like hanging out at the strip club by yourself) and a very understanding wife later, and I was waiting in line at the Coliseum for tickets.

In retrospect, it was probably pretty wishful thinking for the Lingerie Football League organizers to book at 90,000-seat stadium for the game. Although the fact that the cheap seats ($21) started at Row 11 (versus twice that much for the first ten rows) tells you that they had a pretty good idea that it wouldn’t be a sell-out. In fact, there were maybe a dozen people who had foolishly bought the more expensive seats only to see the unwashed hordes (like myself) swarm down when they decided to open up the seating so it looked better on video.

I actually watched some of the opening night of play from earlier in the season, and it appeared that most of the “players” performed as expected: like lingerie models who were more interested in not breaking a nail or having a boob fall out of their top than actually playing football. So I had two things I was interested in seeing when kick-off started:

- Tits
- Ass

So what shocked me was how absolutely vicious the game was. The “equipment” is basically an extremely skimpy two-piece bikini, along with lighter shoulder pads and a roller hockey helmet. So I was expecting a lot of rolling around and alligator armed tackles since no one wanted to get hurt before their modeling session next week.

This - emphatically - did not happen. Specifically, the Los Angeles team seemed to decide that they actually cared about making the playoffs and were going pound the San Diego side into the ground. I saw at least a dozen hits that you could legitimately count as “decleaters” where some girl from Los Angeles squared her shoulders and dropped a San Diego player right on her back.

It was like watching Texas take on Louisiana-Monroe in the first game of a college football season. Los Angeles kept scoring and wouldn’t stop (insert your own double entendre here). The final score was 53-0, and ending with the two teams having to be pulled apart after a scrum on the last play of the game. And it wasn’t the roller derby level of fake anger but really we’re going to hang out at the bars together after the game - there was jawing back and forth, pushing, even someone giving the other team the Steve Austin-approved double middle finger salute.

Of course, it was also totally ridiculous. 90 percent of the crowd was totally bombed before the game, which hardly added to the level of intelligent discourse but certain seemed to get everyone fired up. Given the circumstances, even sober I couldn’t resist, especially when the vacuous LA radio personality who was providing play-by-play on the game would say things like “ooh, she got stuffed in the backfield by the LA defense.” Honestly, you guys know me - how am I not expected to shout “oh yeah, I bet she did!” back at this?

Was it worth my $21? Every penny and then some. Would I watch a game on TV? God no. Much like hockey, it’s the type of sport that really only works live. Except with more boobs.

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Posted by The Duke of Everything at 12:41 PM 2 comments  

Lane Kiffin Is Your New USC Head Coach And I Think I'm Going To Be Sick

I’ve been spending the past hour writing and rewriting a post about Lane Kiffin bailing on Tennessee after one season to become USC’s new head football coach. I get a paragraph or so in, and then I feel like I need to go in a new direction and start from scratch (which, oddly enough, is exactly the opposite of how USC decided to go -HIYOOO!). I’d like to think that I’m a pretty cynical sports observer and that there are very few stories that shock me. But I’ll freely admit that my jaw dropped when I heard the news break over the radio this morning. (More specifically, I gasped like a 12-year-old girl who got to the part in Harry Potter where Dumbledore dies, but that’s beside the point.)


From a purely football standpoint, it’s a good move for USC. Rather than getting an NFL retread like Steve Mariucchi or Herm Edwards (and that lightning isn’t striking twice), they were able to lure an established college coach in who is intimately familiar with the program and has an Insta-Staff in place that can save the recruiting season.

(I’ll have to admit that as shocked as I am that Lane Kiffin is coming back to USC, I’m positively flabbergasted that Norm Chow is coming back to coach with him. After all, Chow left USC in the first place because he felt Pete Carroll was throwing him under the bus in order to promote the career of his golden boy coordinator-in-waiting - Lane Kiffin. Still, USC’s offense hasn’t been the same since Chow left, and losing him is a huge blow to UCLA. I wonder if Rick Neuheisel knows where the football dynasty in Los Angeles is now?)

But what I keep coming back to is a personal interest I have in the Tennessee football program. I come from a small town in central California, and my old high school’s quarterback is named Tyler Bray. Not only did he lead his school to the section title this season, but he became an elite-level recruit, finally landing at - you guessed it - Tennesee. In fact, he skipped his last semester of high school (where he was also a star basketball player) so he could graduate early and enroll at Tennessee to take part in spring football.

Well, now he’s stuck at Tennessee after the coach who sold him on the tradition and pride of Volunteer football caught a quick flight out of Knoxville for the bright lights of Los Angeles as soon as the plane could leave. Who knows who his coach will be next year (David Cutcliffe? Skip Holtz? Phil Fulmer?) and who knows what shape the program will be in. But unlike Kiffin, he can’t just go looking for the best offer. He’s either stuck eating a year of eligibility to transfer or hope that the new coach is as enamored of his talents as Kiffin was.

And that’s what sticks in my craw about the whole situation. As I wrote yesterday, I was getting tired of the creeping arrogance and smugness in the USC program. Now they’ve brought in a coach who takes all of those elements to another level. Tennessee fans had developed a love/hate relationship with Kiffin in just one year. He certainly wasn’t the genial Southern gentleman fans had become accustomed to in Knoxville. Much like a young Steve Spurrier, he wasn’t afraid to make bold statements and rub opponents the wrong way.

And he wasn’t afraid to play fast and loose with recruiting rules, which had already brought him under the crosshairs of the NCAA in his only season at Tennessee. Which makes him a curious choice for a program with the Reggie Bush situation lingering over its head and a basketball program already having self-imposed major sanctions for all manner of shenanigans. The NCAA might as well save some money by purchasing a condo for the rotating team of investigators who will be watching USC over the next few years rather than get hotel rooms over and over again.

Will it work on the field? It certainly could - Kiffin and Ed Orgeron are a formidable recruiting team, and we all know about Norm Chow’s ability as a coordinator. But if you’re a USC fan, are you really in love with the hire? Does it fill you with Trojan pride or a lingering feeling of dread. I remember having the same feeling when Tim Floyd was brought on to coach the USC basketball team, and we all know how that turned out.

That being said, I’d like to be the first to officially welcome Lane Kiffin’s wife Layla back to Los Angeles. If you are interested in making Your Face is a Sports Blog the site for your first interview as the First Lady of USC, just call me.

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Posted by The Duke of Everything at 8:28 PM 0 comments  

Coming To Terms With Not Caring About Pete Carroll

Up until today, I’ve been hesitant to write anything about Pete Carroll’s departure from USC to become the head coach of the Seattle Seahawks. This might be surprising to a lot of you who know me as a USC grad and proud Trojan. But my reluctance to put pen to paper about this story has nothing to do with any inability to come to terms with Carroll leaving USC, or a lack of ability to separate the animalistic nature of my fandom from my ability to provide in-depth, thoughtful analysis of the situation. No, the answer is far more insidious and something I’ve had trouble coming to terms with since the story first broke: I honestly don’t care anymore.


What was troubling for me in admitting to this fact is that saying that you don’t care that your team is losing a coaching icon seems a lot like saying that you don’t care about that team anymore. And while that isn’t true in the larger context, it is true in the short term. I went to one home game this year (and it was against Washington State, so that barely counts as a game) and I found a lot more reasons this year to catch games on Tivo rather than live. Taking the daughter to the zoo? Catch the game on Tivo. There’s a sprint car race 50 miles away? I can watch the game on Tivo later. Need to do grocery shopping? Kickball practice? Toenail degrouting? Tivo, Tivo, Tivo!

It would be easy to assume that I’m a fair-weather fan, and that my waning interest in the team was a product of the team’s relatively poor showing this year. But let me remind everyone that I went to school during the final years of John Robinson II (aka the Phoning It In Years) and the beginning of the era of He Who Shall Not Be Named (Paul Hackett). I saw some of the worst football imaginable, featuring indifferent or clueless coaches creating ill-advised game plans that were executed by overhyped, outmatched players. And yet those are some of my favorite memories of USC football.

So what’s the problem? Part of it is that I couldn’t stand the annual rite of one or two losses to far inferior opponents every year. They had different names: Oregon State, Stanford, Oregon, Washington, but the pattern would play out the same - USC would find a way to sleepwalk through three quarters before being forced to launch a furious rally that would fall short. And then at the end of the season, I’d have to hear other USC fans overload the airwaves, complaining about how if there was a playoff, USC would win the national title because they were playing better than anyone.

Teams lose to lesser competition - this is why football, especially college football, is so interesting. But no team has made such a habit of it as USC did under Pete Carroll. There were always excuses - calls that didn’t go USC’s way, star players being out - but at the end of the day, it always came down to not being ready to play and not being disciplined enough to execute.

USC probably avoided a lot more losses through much of Pete Carroll’s tenure at USC because of one thing - the coaching staff’s ability to make adjustments during the game. USC came out flat more often than not under Pete Carroll, but they were also (in the team’s heyday) as good of a second-half team as any recent football squad. A team could have a double-digit lead at halftime, and the only question would be how many minutes into the second half would it be before USC had taken the lead. And if USC led at the half? Forget it.

But this stopped happening the last couple of season, culminating in the 2009 season, which was a coaching disaster. I’ll have to go back to the dark days of Paul Hackett to remember a team that was so unconcerned about making changes at halftime. Either the coaching staff ran out of ideas about halfway through the season or they kept clinging onto the cute but ultimately wrong-headed notion that they didn’t need to make changes since USC had better players and would eventually smother the other team with talent, speed, power, aggression and attitude.

My indifference to Pete Carroll isn’t about individual choices (starting Matt Barkley as a true freshman, not being able to ever decide on one running back); it’s more about the attitude he fostered. There’s a line between “loose” and “rudderless,” and the team seemed to fall over the waterfall to the latter this season. Mental mistakes, dumb penalties, inattention to detail - these were the hallmarks of USC football the last couple of years. And if you want to credit Pete Carroll for shape the team’s attitude when things were going well, you also have to lay the blame on him when the attitude was clearly part of the team’s lack of success.

Here’s the thing: it was something special to be a Trojan fan during Pete Carroll’s tenure at USC. The highlight of my time as a student was beating a far-overmatched Northwestern team in one of the least compelling Rose Bowls in history. Since Pete Carroll came to USC, the level of achievement has reached unprecedented levels. And no amount of sour grapes or feelings of abandonment can change that.

But everyone knew Pete Carroll would leave for the NFL someday; it was just a matter of when. And the Seattle Seahawks job is about as good of a deal as he’s going to get: a healthy salary to stay on the West Coast, and a chance to be heavily involved in the front office (Seattle may be forced to hire a separate GM thanks to how badly they boned things in relation to the Rooney Rule, but I think we all know any GM who is hired is second banana to Coach Carroll). Plus, Seattle has enough defensive talent that they can compete next year in a weak NFC West.

So the inevitable has happened. The only question now is: what’s next. I have to assume that Mike Garrett is only nominally involved in the coaching search at this point, since he’s clearly a dead man walking at USC, waiting for the new school president to come in later this year and send him off to pasture with a fat “retirement” package. Whether USC hires Jack Del Rio, Jeff Fisher or someone else, it won’t be the same as it was under Pete Carroll - ever again. And I’m OK with that. It was an amazing run, but I was ready to move on, and I’m glad Coach Carroll was as well.

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Posted by The Duke of Everything at 1:22 PM 2 comments