College Football: USC and the story of when and why powerhouses fail

As USC continues to struggle through the offseason, let’s dive deeper into college football history to look at powerhouses and stories about when they fail.

After the first losing season for the USC Trojans since 2000, it has been a rough season in Los Angeles. Clay Helton is still on the job, surviving his downturn in 2018 despite the backslide below .500 in the standings. That placed not just Helton but also athletic director Lynn Swann firmly on the hot seat for the 2019 season.

Then, after an offseason move to bring in Kliff Kingsbury as the new offensive coordinator, the former Texas Tech coach left for the Arizona Cardinals head coaching job before even coaching up a single Trojans player. In a move that will only make the job harder in the future, Kingsbury was forced to buy out his coordinator contract just to have a shot at the NFL gig after Swann refused to give Kingsbury permission to interview with the Cardinals.

The instability in Los Angeles has permeated to talent acquisition, as the Trojans rank No. 18 in the 247sports.com composite rankings leading into National Signing Day. After falling below the top 10 for the first time since 2013, USC has a stunted class coming in which could further impact the Trojans down the road for whoever is coaching the team in the next few years.

It is a conundrum that we see time and time again across college football. Even the most legendary powerhouses cannot escape the inevitable fall from grace at various points throughout their history. Let’s dive in and look at when powerhouses have fallen over time in order to distill down the reasons why they fall.

A quick overview of powerhouses that have fallen in recent years

A perennial College Football Playoff threat like Alabama can’t always stay at the pinnacle of the sport. The Crimson Tide was irrelevant as recently as the early 2000s under Dennis Franchione and Mike Shula. Only Nick Saban’s deft touch has allowed Bama to return to powerhouse status over the past decade.

Current national champion Clemson was more famous for spectacular failure than championship football before Dabo Swinney came along and replaced Terry Bowden. Their modus operandi was building up spectacular hope in their fan base and then watching it get dashed by a seemingly inferior opponent.

Notre Dame, one of the other two semifinalists, has struggled to maintain a consistent presence among the top teams in the country in the 21st century. While they went to the BCS national championship game in January 2013 and again to the semifinals in the most recent season after a pair of undefeated regular seasons, they have also endured four sub-.500 seasons since 2001.

Oklahoma, the last semifinalist in the quartet of College Football Playoff participants, was at a low point in the 1990s before Bob Stoops came in and restored order in the Big 12. The Sooners put together five losing seasons in the seven years prior to Stoops taking over the program in 1999.

We have seen similar stumbles in more recent years from programs like Michigan, Miami, and Texas. Florida State has slipped from a place at the apex of college football they occupied as recently as 2013. Tennessee and Virginia Tech, both teams that were major factors in the early BCS era, have struggled to come near that peak in nearly two decades. And even a program like Ohio State, traditionally among the top powerhouses on a national level, has endured roadblocks in recent history.

What causes the fall from grace for powerhouses?

When studying these football teams, it becomes apparent that their collapses are hardly unique in the conditions that lead to the collapse. There are several factors at play that cause powerhouses to tumble from their traditional perch looking down at the plebeian programs of college football.

Let’s look at four specific factors that drive the diminution of power at college football powerhouses. The quartet of influences are the impact of coaching, the loss of key talent, the challenge of sanctions, and relative strength vis-à-vis conference competitors.

1. Coaching as a catalyst for successes and failures

Perhaps the biggest factor that determines whether powerhouses remain at the top or backslide to mediocrity is coaching. As mentioned in the introduction, USC will enter the fourth full year of Clay Helton’s tenure with the embattled coach getting one more chance to redeem himself. Since losing Pete Carroll to the Seattle Seahawks job after the 2009 season, though, the Trojans have struggled to return to the national title-contending peak of his tenure.

USC pulled the plug on Carroll’s successor, Lane Kiffin, early in his fourth season on the job after a 0-2 start to Pac-12 play. Ed Orgeron went 6-2 over the rest of the regular season as the interim head coach, but bolted when it was apparent the Trojans would not offer him the full-time job moving forward.

Helton stepped into the position for the bowl game, but he too was passed up in favor of former USC offensive coordinator Steve Sarkisian. Poaching away Sarkisian from Washington only served to further sink the Trojans from prominence, however, as Sarkisian struggled to generate wins on the field and struggled with substance abuse issues off the field.

Helton finally earned the chance to lead USC after going 5-4 in his second stint as interim head coach. In the following two seasons, Helton won 10 games in 2016 and 11 games in 2017 with a pair of New Year’s Six trips.

By missing on their first two choices as head coach, USC allowed its football program to fade from dominance. Had the program opted to keep Kiffin, or offer Orgeron the position after a far more impressive interim run than earned Helton the full-time job, things could have been very different in Los Angeles.

This is similar to what happened at other programs. We already discussed briefly the tenures of Mike Shula and Dennis Franchione at Alabama. Michigan whiffed on Rich Rodriguez and Brady Hoke after the end of the Lloyd Car era. After Lou Holtz left South Bend, Notre Dame turned to Bob Davie before Tyrone Willingham and Charlie Weis further weakened the state of the Fighting Irish.

2. The impact of losing key talent to the NFL

USC’s slide in 2018 can also be attributed to the loss of players like standout quarterback Sam Darnold to the NFL. When Darnold opted to declare early for the NFL Draft, it forced the Trojans to turn to true freshman JT Daniels at the position. While there were positive signs that Daniels could develop into the next great USC quarterback, Daniels faced the inevitable growing pains of starting right out of high school.

The 14-to-10 touchdowns-to-interceptions ratio for the freshman in 2018 illustrates a huge reason why USC slid from No. 16 to No. 48 in passing yards and from No. 27 to No. 70 in passing efficiency. A young receiving corps did not always help Daniels out, as dropped passes reduced his completion rate below 60 percent for the season.

Superior talent is supposed to be regenerative at college football powerhouses. They do not rebuild so much as reload, year after recruiting year. But a big reason why coaching is so significant is because coaches in college football are in large part salesmen to young laborers who often have multiple options for their services.

And because there is a non-negotiable preset cut-rate market value placed on this talent, even a team with continuity at head coach could collapse if the coordinators and position coaches that do much of the recruiting are not up to snuff. There is no ability to mask for weaker recruiters with bigger incentives.

The top talent tends to gravitate toward powerhouses. Even when they transfer, players like Jalen Hurts and Justin Fields tend to gravitate from one powerhouse program to another. But even though the NFL has also depressed free market value for rookie salaries, going professional as early as possible is still the ultimate goal for most top talents in a sport where physical brutality is a critical component and contracts are not guaranteed for players whose careers can end with an injury.

So even though a program like USC can still bring in a top-shelf quarterback like Daniels to replace Darnold, losing the veteran a year early can force a development plan to push forward ahead of an optimal timetable. That has been at the root of much of Miami’s collapse after the early 2000s, with talent-laden teams dominating the competition and then going pro en masse. If coaches cannot replenish the talent adequately, it results in a collapse.

3. Sanctions: The black sheep in the room

Of course, there is a third, less savory ingredient to the collapse of many powerhouses. When the NCAA places sanctions on a program, that tends to knock down even the strongest of powerhouses a peg or two.

Sanctions do not even require the severity of the death penalty meted out by the NCAA against SMU in 1987. The loss of scholarships to offer, and the prevention of playing in postseason contests, can lead to teams recruiting not only less talent but also lower-quality talent in the recruiting race. Coaches with the requisite skills and clean enough hands to escape sanction leave the tainted program for better opportunities.

A program can hold on for a short while despite sanctions. We saw this happen at USC, where Lane Kiffin won 10 games in his second season in 2011 but was unable to participate in either the Pac-12 championship game or a bowl game. Recruiting dropped from No. 3 to No. 8 to No. 13 between 2011 and 2013 as sanctions took their toll on the program.

Sanctions were a large reason why Dennis Franchione bolted Tuscaloosa after two otherwise-fruitful seasons, winning 10 games his second season and finishing atop the SEC but ineligible to play in the Sugar Bowl. They are why Ohio State was forced to part ways with Jim Tressel, Penn State ended the long Joe Paterno era, and a five-loss Wisconsin team won the Big Ten title in 2012.

The problem is that success is often achieved through scandal. As we saw in the case of Miami, their glory days of the 1980s and their later successes in the early 2000s were fueled by various schemes to assist student athletes that skirted NCAA regulations. Boosters provided added incentive to attend The U and play for the Hurricanes, just as they have at USC and other programs over the years.

Whatever one thinks about the current structure of remuneration for college athletes, however, what is indisputable is the fact that the payment schemes initiated by internal and external actors have not dissipated even in the wake of the SMU penalties.

It is a recruiting field where only the black market can appreciably alter the terms of an otherwise indistinguishable scholarship offer that could be on the table from any number of FBS powerhouses. As such, the black market will continue to provide an opportunity for historically successful programs and nouveau riche teams alike to grow into powerhouses, and even the eventual fall cannot tarnish the shine of successes in the moment and the collective memory.

4. Conference realignment as an additional factor to consider

There is an ongoing trend to continue aligning and realigning with different schools and conferences. These shifts can often have deleterious effects on both the teams that leave and the configurations weakened by their departure.

In the case of USC, the beginning of their slide really occurred after the Pac-10 became the Pac-12. Sanctions prevented Lane Kiffin’s Trojans from playing for the inaugural Pac-12 championship game, and they went nine years from 2008 and 2017 between conference titles. Carroll’s departure, the impact of sanctions on recruiting, and instability at the head coaching position all impacted the ability to adjust to the new west-coast landscape.

Penn State, a national champion in 1982 and 1986, has yet to earn a shot at the national title since moving to the Big Ten in the early 1990s. Similarly, teams like Miami and Virginia Tech slid from national contenders to regional afterthoughts when they left the Big East for the ACC in the mid-2000s.

And the conferences they depart have also felt the impact of the departure. The Big East collapsed after losing its most talented programs. Though they managed to replenish for some time from Conference USA, the well eventually dried and the new programs that developed into emergent powerhouses such as Louisville ultimately departed for what seemed at the time like greener pastures but also turned out to be tougher sailing in the end.

Final thoughts about how and why powerhouses fall

What the history of college football demonstrates indisputably is that success is cyclical. No program can maintain perpetually perennial contention, and a confluence of various factors will always conspire to eventually bring a downturn. Even the most historically dominant powerhouses are prone to such nadirs.

The inverse, though, is also true. Alabama rebounded quickly after hiring a man who evolved into perhaps the greatest head coach in college football history, once sanctions had run their course and recruiting classes started flowing to Tuscaloosa. The right hire at head coach allowed Ohio State to quickly emerge from their own set of sanctions to contend for national titles and claim one in 2014. One class of transcendent stars can also flip the narrative.

Powerhouses do not obtain that title by being permanent fixtures at the top. Nobody expects perfection every year, except for fan bases who have been blessed with little but success. Anything from injuries to a new position coach can alter a single season, but it takes more systemic issues with coaching, recruiting, rules violations, and conference dynamics to effect a more lasting fall from the top.

In the end, that means USC fans probably have little to sweat long term. Their program will return eventually at or near the top of the mountain, contending for national championships as powerhouses are prone to do. These blips are uncomfortable, and they can sometimes last for a decade or more. But powerhouses are powerhouses not because they are always perfect but because they have the resilience to endure downturns and eventually return to prominence.