I am told that Democrats are dealing with the stress of the midterm elections by eating and drinking.
Commissioned by the fitness site Daily Burn, a poll conducted by YouGov shows Democrats are 50 percent more likely than Republicans to be stress-eating, drinking and over-exercising, NBC News reported.
Personally, I’m dieting, trying to get under 200 pounds.
Most of my stress in life at the time has to do with the USC Football Team. And its coach.
The coach was hoping that the would be an easy win. Oregon state is, after all, only 2 and 6.
However, the game is close at half time and the SC team has not been known this season for good second half efforts.
Fortunately, the defense finally stepped up in the second half and we won. This has been a disappointing season but I am used to them. The university is run by people who are vaguely ashamed of the football program. They would rather be Harvard. I have been a USC fan and alumnus since 1956. I have seen two great football programs destroyed by the administration. John McKay left SC in 1975 with a strong program that was taken over by his assistant, John Robinson.
Robinson had a successful record with national championships in 1978 and 1979. In 1982, he and Marv Goux, a longtime coach, were implicated in a mini-scandal. It involved players taking a speech course at an Arizona college which provided them all with A grades and helped with overall GPA. In addition, Marv Goux, a long time assistant coach, had been helping the players to sell their unused free tickets to games for extra money. There was nothing illegal about selling the tickets but the combination of the speech class and the long term practice of helping them sell tickets resulted in suspension of both coaches.
The speech class scandal was the result of the administration appointing junior faculty to monitor players’ academic performance. The coaches had always done this and were wise to players’ evasions of rules. The young academics became enthralled with their relationship with players on a nationally ranked team and failed to police the speech class evasion. Of course, once the story became public, the coaches and not the faculty “monitors” were blamed. Robinson had a contract provision that provided “tenure” as a full professor, a provision that McKay had negotiated and which was included in Robinson’s contract.
Robinson then spent an idle year after which he left to coach the Los Angeles Rams.
Ten years of mediocrity for the football program followed under coaches Ted Tollner and Larry Smith.
Marv Goux went to the Rams with Robinson and stayed as a Rams coach and then administrator until 1990, after which, in 1994, he became ill with cancer. Goux took with him the spirit of Trojan football, a consideration ignored by the administrators.
Robinson returned in 1993 and his team won three Rose Bowls but his recruiting spark had gone and he left after the 1997 season. He coached at UNLV from 1999 to 2004 but had only modest success. USC then hired Paul Hackett, an NFL offensive coordinator, who had a poor record for two years before returning to the NFL in 2001.
Pete Carroll had been an NFL coach but was fired by the New England Patriots in 1999. He spent the next year out of coaching. His best coaching jobs had been as defensive coordinator, which would stand him in good stead when he took over at SC in 2001.
Carroll was hired for the next season by the San Francisco 49ers, where he served as defensive coordinator for the following two seasons (1995–96). His return to success as the defensive coordinator led to his hiring as the head coach of the New England Patriots in 1997, replacing coach Bill Parcells, who had resigned after disputes with the team’s ownership. His 1997 Patriots team won the AFC East division title, but his subsequent two teams did not fare as well—losing in the wild card playoff round in 1998, and missing the playoffs after a late-season slide in 1999—and he was fired after the 1999 season. Patriots owner Robert Kraft said firing Carroll was one of the toughest decisions he has had to make since buying the team, stating, “A lot of things were going on that made it difficult for him to stay, some of which were out of his control.
Paul Hackett was fired at the end of the 2000 season but the school had no good prospect to replace him.
Carroll was named the Trojans’ head coach on December 15, 2000, signing a five-year contract after USC had gone through a tumultuous 18-day search to replace fired coach Paul Hackett.[15][16][17] He was not the Trojans’ first choice, and was considered a long shot as the USC Athletic Department under Director Mike Garrett initially planned to hire a high-profile coach with recent college experience.[18] Meanwhile Carroll, who had not coached in over a year and not coached in the college ranks since 1983, drew unfavorable comparisons to the outgoing Hackett
Garrett did not recruit Carroll and the story is that Carroll was visiting his daughter, a student as SC, when he walked into Garrett’s office and offered himself as a coach. This would have subsequent consequences.
After a slow first season with Hackett recruited players, Carroll’s teams proceeded to go 67–7 over the next 74 games, winning two national championships and playing for another.
Watching the Alabama-LSU game last night, I noted the commentators describing the “arrogance” of Alabama as an asset and commenting that SC under Pete Carroll had had the same certainty of winning. His teams were particularly notable for improving the play in the second half, a sign of good coaching.
The administration next destroyed the program after a scandal over Reggie Bush, a star player in 2006, erupted when it was revealed that a would-be agent arranged to buy a house for Bush’s parents in San Diego.
Allegations that Bush’s family received hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts was first reported in September 2006, which was just months after the New Orleans Saints took him with the No. 2 overall selection in the 2006 NFL Draft.
Once investigations began, Bush immediately denied that he had taken wrong actions. Of course, fast forward a few years later to the present-day, and it’s apparent that he had.
It ended with Bush returning the Heisman trophy he was awarded in 2005. The award was surrendered in 2010. There were allegations that Carroll knew about the scandal but none were proven.
The story that I have heard about what happened next is that Carroll, having learned about the developing scandal, went to Garrett and asked if the university was going to support him. Getting a noncommittal reply from Garrett who had no attachment to Carroll, Pete chose to accept the most recent offer he had had from the NFL.
On January 11, 2010, it was reported that Carroll would be leaving USC to coach the Seattle Seahawks. Carroll had told his players the previous evening that he would be resigning his position with the Trojans to become the new head coach of the Seattle Seahawks. According to the Los Angeles Times, Carroll came to agreement with the Seahawks on a 5-year $33 million contract to become head coach.
The SC football program has descended, once again, into mediocrity.
Todd McNair, a running backs coach under Carroll, was let go and punished by being suspended from coaching, as he was rumored to have been connected to Bush, an association he has denied and he has sued the NCAA for damages.
Meanwhile SC football has suffered through Lane Kiffin, Steve Sarkesian who was hired in spite of rumored alcohol problems in Seattle, and now Clay Helton.
If I were a top prospect as a coach, I would be leery of this program which seems faintly ashamed of its football team.
