Trojan Pride

USC\'s Pete Carroll Finds a True Home
by: Jeff Davis
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It’s clear to me that I want to put together a program that can win on a consistent basis and compete for championships year in and year out. This is a grand opportunity here,” a proud Pete Carroll said early this summer during a break at his football camp on the University of Southern California campus in Los Angeles. “USC has all the elements you need for a championship program.”

Coach Carroll can’t wait to unleash his fourth edition of the Trojans to see how they run and how they pass in Norm Chow’s exciting, productive offense and how they stifle opponents in his own smothering defense. With virtually everybody back from last season’s national co-champions, and ready replacements in place for the have- departed, USC is the 2004 pre-season favorite to win the school’s tenth national college football championship.

It’s bound to be a crowd-pleasing team again this season, a reflection of its enthusiastic coach. “High energy is pretty accurate. I’m loaded with it,” Coach Carroll says. “I expect my staff to coach with great passion and really bring the energy to our practice field which leads us to the things that we do on game day.”

The fun starts with Norm Chow’s version of Showtime, a big play offense designed to strike from anywhere on the field. Chow came with Carroll to USC in 2001 after 27 seasons at Brigham Young and a year at N.C. State where he turned out many of the greatest quarterbacks in football history, college and pro. Chow’s BYU pass-masters include Gifford Nielsen, Marc Wilson, Jim McMahon, Steve Young, Robbie Bosco, and Heisman Trophy winner Ty Detmer. He even tutored State’s Philip Rivers. “Norm’s background in college football gave us instant credibility in putting together a program. He brought us great experience, knowing what to expect and how to deal with the transitions with the seasons and the calendars,” Carroll says.

It took two seasons at USC for Chow to fashion Carson Palmer into the 2002 Heisman winner and NFL’s 2003 top draft choice by the Cincinnati Bengals. As an encore last year Chow and Carroll unveiled left hander Matt Leinhart who led the Trojans to the national co-championship. “Matt’s a really bright quarterback, a fine all around athlete and a guy the players respond to and respect,” says Coach Carroll of the young man who passed for 327 yards and three touchdowns and scored a fourth on a pass from Mike Williams as USC trounced Michigan 28-14 in the Rose Bowl.

As with every other position, Carroll has a ready-to-go replacement at quarterback in John David Booty should the unthinkable happen and Leinhart go down. “He’s competing for that job too and continues to compete for it,” Carroll says. “He’s only a play away, so we approach John David’s upbringing as though he’s going to be the starter.”

“In game situations, they know what to do, because they have done it in practice,” says KNX Radio sports director Steve Grad who’s covered USC football since the second John Robinson regime. “They know Chow is in charge of the offense and Carroll the defense.”

“We build our program around competition,” Carroll says . “We compete in every phase of our program and try to heighten the level of our performance by the level of our practice and our off season work. It’s been instrumental in what we’re doing.”

As recently as 2000, very few people in and out of football would have imagined that Pete Carroll would be enjoying this enviable position where, at USC, he could load, and reload as the talent just keeps coming. He had been a coaching lifer who fulfilled a boyhood dream that started in the late ‘60s at Larkspur, California’s Redwood High School in Marin County north of San Francisco. Carroll started his climb up the football ladder as a two time all league safety at the University of the Pacific where he earned a degree in business administration in 1973.

While he studied for a master’s in physical education at Pacific, he started at the coaching bottom, graduate assistant. By 1977, the young man was on his way. He started under Lou Holtz at Arkansas, moved to Iowa State, then on to Ohio State with Earle Bruce, moved on to North Carolina State, then returned to Pacific as defensive coordinator for a year in 1983. The following year he moved into the National Football League with the Buffalo Bills.

The diligent Carroll earned recognition as a top defensive assistant at every stop over the next decade, from the Minnesota Vikings where he developed the NFL’s top pass defense in a five year stay. At age 43, Pete Carroll was a hot coaching property when he became head coach of the New York Jets in 1994. Everything about it was wrong, but it turned out to be a big break. In 1995, he returned to the Bay Area and cemented his reputation with the San Francisco 49ers with the league’s top rated units in 1995 and ‘96. That led to his second head coaching job, this with the New England Patriots where his teams went 27-21 from 1997-1999. Then, after setting the table for a Super Bowl, Pete Carroll was out again, this time in favor of Bill Belichik. In 2000, for the first time in his life, he had no place to go that fall. “It’s different in college from the NFL. The NFL is built on parity and a kind of self -correcting: you have the best team, you get the worst draft pick. And on and on.”

Exit the NFL. Pete Carroll wasn’t finished with coaching though. So he went back to work, and redesigned his career in what turned out to be a working sabbatical. “I did a bunch of stuff. I kind of nosed around in some football related things, some internet stuff,” Carroll recalled. “I watched my son Brennan (now on his USC staff) play his senior year at Pittsburgh, and spent a lot of time writing stuff that would ready me for my next job.”

Carroll’s personal breakthrough happened when he picked up a book a friend had given him. The author was college basketball’s greatest championship winner, John Wooden. He realized that Wooden ground away for 16 years in relative anonymity in Westwood Village before everything clicked. “In his 17th year at UCLA, he won a national championship. After he won his first, he won 10 of the next 12. It hit me so profoundly,” Carroll says. “Once he figured out how he wanted to do things, he got it right and got it right for a long time. Up until then, he was still formulating exactly how to organize himself.”

With Wooden as his inspiration, Carroll vowed he would show the world that he too could coach championship teams. “I figured that I needed to get on a racehorse pace to get my whole program organized where I would have all my belief systems in order and everything exactly the way I wanted it, if I got another chance so I could maximize my opportunity,” Carroll says of his liberation. “I just didn’t change anything philosophically as much as I zeroed in on things that were important to me and how I wanted to get it done.”

Under John McKay, USC, in the ‘60s and ‘70s, jousted for top honors year in and year out with Ara Parseghian’s Notre Dame teams, Woody Hayes at Ohio State, and Bear Bryant at Alabama. The initial reaction to “Pete Carroll???” as in “huh???” resembled the way baseball experts thumbed their collective noses in 1949 at the New York Yankees when they hired a previous managerial failure with the Boston Braves and Brooklyn Dodgers named Casey Stengel. “At first, I wasn’t accepted very well,” Carroll acknowledges.

The naysayers roared when the Trojans got off to a 2-5 start in 2001 bottoming out in a 27-16 loss to Notre Dame. Then came the turnaround for a team that has won 27 of its last 31 games. That includes a 38-17 win over Iowa in the Orange Bowl as USC finished the 2002 season at 11-2, ranked number four. “It has worked out quite well and I’m very happy with it.”

The rap on Pete Carroll in the NFL was the scornful put down that he was a player’s coach. He has a ready comeback. “The players’ coach thing is always thrown around because communications is so important to me,” Carroll says. “I’m with our players a lot. I talk to them as much as I can. I spend time with them and my coaches. For me to do a good job of teaching somebody, I have to know who they are. I have to put them in a lot of situations and be around them a lot to get to know them well enough so that I can reach them in the most advantageous way.”

KNX’s Grad sees plenty of positives in Carroll’s approach. “I think kids like the fact he was in the NFL. Now they like being with a winner. He has a great personality. He doesn’t patronize them. They have the food, the facilities, and they see the Coliseum packed with 90,000 people with a glamorous schedule, national TV. It’s the tradition.”

“The way it’s structured here with President Steven Sample and (athletic director) Mike Garrett giving me free reign to run the program, I can do what I have to do,” Carroll says. “I have great control and it’s very rare and difficult to get that and maintain that in the NFL. I love where I am.”

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Advice Column

Pete Carroll’s three-year record at Southern California in his first collegiate head coaching job is 29-9, an impressive 76.3 winning percentage. As strong as that is, in his last 31 games, USC has gone 27-4, routing Iowa in the 2003 Orange Bowl 38-17 for a number four finish. That set the table for last season’s 12-1 record topped off by a 28-14 win over Michigan in the Rose Bowl to win the media poll and earn a co-national title with BCS and Sugar Bowl champion LSU.

With that came a slew of honors: American Football Coaches Division I-A Coach of the Year; Home Depot National Coach of the Year; Maxwell Club College Coach of the Year; ESPN.Com National Coach of the Year; Washington, D.C. Touchdown Club Coach of the Year; and the American Football Foundation Frank Leahy Co-Coach of the Year. He also was USC's first Pac-10 Coach of the Year since Larry Smith won it in 1988.

Coach Carroll is only too glad to pass along his tips to young coaches.

“It’s important for young coaches to realize they’re on a quest to figure out what they believe. They must work really hard to settle in their minds: their style, their belief systems. Out of that comes your philosophy and approach,” Carroll says.

“If you just go ahead and coach and coach like somebody else, you just flounder in the wind. It's not just saying you're going to do something, you have to work at it. You are on a quest to find out what you believe. In my case, I needed to get exactly to a point of how I felt about as many things as I possibly could think of. It took a lot of years for me to do it. For a younger coach, you want to get there as soon as possible. You need to know what’s important to you, what your uncompromising principles are, where you draw the line in all areas. If you don’t get that, you will flop in the wind.”

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