When the 2008 financial meltdown engulfed these United States, Americans were introduced to the phrase “too big to fail.”
Over the past several years, Lane Kiffin defined a similar expression: “failing upward.”
Kiffin got an NFL head coaching job, the Tennessee job, and then the USC job — prestigious gigs, all of them — without having proved a single (good) thing as a head coach. Results — as on Wall Street circa 2008 — might have been horrible, but for some people, results really don’t carry negative consequences. They find a soft landing spot somewhere in a vast system.
Kiffin didn’t first succeed as a head coach at a Mountain West Conference job. He didn’t first get his training wheels at a smaller Power 5 job (Purdue, Washington State, Iowa State). He wasn’t first tested by being given the keys at a job in what was then the Big East or a more souped-up version of Conference USA, before that league lost its best football schools (Houston, Tulsa, SMU, UCF) to the newly-formed American Athletic Conference.
Kiffin was somehow promoted straight to the top tier of the football coaching food chain. When he failed at one of the worst organizations in the NFL, he got a pretty sweet college gig in Knoxville. After one decidedly ho-hum season with the Volunteers, Kiffin was given a golden ticket to USC. Kiffin failed his way up the food chain, a story of American protectionism in the face of poor results.
It’s a story of the lack of accountability in the higher reaches of systemic power in this country. It’s a story which shows everything that’s bad — and not truly democratic or merit-based — about modern American institutions and structures.
Pat Haden — a Rhodes Scholar — felt that hiring yet another Pete Carroll assistant without any significant head coaching accomplishments was the right response to a coaching vacancy.
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Just think about that for a second. A highly intelligent person — at least by general outward measurements of reasoning, deductive skill, and overall mental acuity — thought that the “failing upward” model was the right way to replace the personification of “failing upward.” Haden thought that Steve Sarkisian’s mere familarity with USC, and his cozy connections with people in and around the program, would be enough to translate into big wins on the field.
It sure seemed like a spectacular blunder at the time.
It also felt like liberation for University of Washington fans who were tired of archrival Oregon throwing “SEVEN WIN SARK!” chants in their faces for several years.
Thursday night, everything about those two inclinations was powerfully affirmed inside the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The coach Washington was all too happy to see in USC attire could not have coached any worse, losing as an 18-point favorite at home. The coach who came to Washington as a result of Steve Sarkisian’s abrupt departure scored the elusive win which Husky fans needed to see in order to know that a young team has the potential to grow into something better down the line.
This win is special for Chris Petersen — let’s indeed acknowledge that — but it’s hardly a guarantee that Washington is going to fulfill all its aspirations. The bigger story from Thursday night can only be one thing: Seven-Win Sark, bereft of bark, sits in the dark in Los Angeles.
Yes, he still has time to turn things around, but as was the case with Lane Kiffin late in the 2012 season, you can see and feel — in every waking moment and every little detail of each gameday — that a USC team led by a Pete Carroll assistant is rudderless.
Copious quantities of talent are being squandered, which puts Sark — as a second-year coach — in a much different position compared to Charlie Strong of Texas, who doesn’t have a fraction of the NFL-level material Sark oversees in L.A.
The quarterback — in this case, Cody Kessler — looks lost.
Play selection and sequencing are atrocious.
USC’s first-and-10 pass near the Washington 30 inside the final six minutes of regulation, precisely when the Trojans were hammering the Huskies’ front seven, was a grade-A (or rather, grade-F) play-selection error. The decision permanently altered the trajectory of the drive, giving Washington the final lifeline it needed in order to win.
Game strategy is somehow worse than the play selection, which is saying something.
Sarkisian opted for a field goal when trailing by five with under four minutes left. He had only one timeout left (thanks to brutal timeout management), so the idea of kicking a field goal — thereby giving Washington the ball back — should never have come up for consideration. As a bonus, USC used almost all 40 seconds of the play clock before kicking that field goal. Confusion reigned on the field before the kick, which helps explain the poor hold (laces not out) and the subsequently short boot, which was not struck cleanly at all.
Sarkisian’s overall management of a game is as bad as it gets; keep in mind that in another home loss to Stanford (also as a double-digit-point favorite — 10), Sark trailed by 10 points with under 1:30 left. Rather than kick a medium-length field goal with 45 seconds left, as he needed to do, Sarkisian chased the touchdown into the final few seconds, ensuring a loss. If a coach wants to give the impression that he has no clue, Sark’s doing a heckuva job.
Final verdicts and obituaries on a coaching career can wait, but it can’t be denied that Steve Sarkisian’s days as a head coach are numbered if something doesn’t drastically change in a heartbeat. Notre Dame is next on the schedule for USC, with Utah and California right behind. Oregon and UCLA linger at the back end of the slate. Right now, at least four of those games — if not all five — look like losses. If USC does indeed lose four of those games, the end-of-season record will be 6-6.
Gone. No debate.
Should Steve Sarkisian be allowed to coach his way out of trouble in the month of October? Yes. The Cal game will be Oct. 31, after Utah on the 24th and Notre Dame on the 17th. We can give Sark that much time to reverse course.
The problem at USC is that there isn’t a soul inside the program who has any right to be optimistic at this point.
It feels very Lane Kiffinish in here, doesn’t it?
“Failing upward” might not continue much longer for the Men of Troy.
