cuillini
- San Bernardino, Ca.
The lack of recruiting is big. Here in socal there's tons of top notch talent.....And the best have been leaving for Alabama, OSU, Georgia, Oregon, etc. Alums have been really upset about that and expect USC to successfully recruit most of those players.Like others have said, expectations are the main reason. Helton was never supposed to have the interim tag taken from his title, because he really wasn’t a great fit — southern guy in SoCal. But after winning conference in first year, the players wanted him and USC AD (believe it was Haden) had all kinds of problems and gave job to him before running much if any kind of search. Then 3 years later he had the audacity of finishing under .500 and compounded it with bringing in a overall recruiting class of 20 (4th in conf.) followed by a class that was 64th overall and 12th in Pac 12. USC doesn’t finish under .500 and doesn’t fail to recruit well — especially in its own backyard. He also had the audacity to lose quite a few of their top out of conference games (think he only beat ND once, but sure he had losing record against Irish). A lot of people thought new AD would make change after 2019 season, but he had all kinds of other fires to put out in the athletic department, so he decided to wait on Helton until he could give him a thorough look of his own. So when a guy who wasn’t really a good fit culturally and not considered a great coach overall loses to Stanford 42-28 at home (a Stanford team that lost to Kansas St. at home the week before while scoring only 7 points), AD said he had seen enough. Helton just didn’t seem like the guy who could make them consistent winners at the top of the conference — giving them real chance at playoffs every year.
On top of that, it looks like Chip Kelly and UCLA have become the dominant LA team. That can't fly for any USC fan.