Final Season Musings, Clay Helton, Chip Kelly, and Lowest Common Denominator Chat Boards

The season has wrapped up and I thought some post-season musings were in order since just a few things have happened since my last post. I’d love to leave it where we did (with USC beating UCLA and winning the Pac-12 South), but we since have had a few things happen (losing the Pac-12 championship to Stanford after a massive comeback but then a second round of Stanford out-muscling us; naming Clay Helton full-time head coach; Sark’s $30 million lawsuit; the firing of most of our assistant coaches; and then last night’s loss to Wisconsin). So yes, there are a few things to cover here. We’ll start with Chip Kelly.Basically, in reading the chat boards of the USC community, filled with those who, ummmm, didn’t quite leverage their USC education in life, here is what happened: Pat Haden had a sure chance to bring Chip Kelly in, who has won four national championships and was about to win a couple Super Bowls, but he turned his cell phone off when Chip called trying to sign a contract, and now UCLA has Chip Kelly, AND Chip will win a Super Bowl in the NFL (maybe with UCLA?), and we have Kiffin coming back along with Paul Hackett.The chat boards have somewhere between 5-10% of their participants who constitute being civilized members of society, who are not literally the bottom of the barrel of sports fan intelligence. On a USC board, it is particularly depressing to see, because our university more than any other in the world stands for the spirit of fighting on, where these degenerates literally fire a coach on any individual PLAY that results in a loss. Some basic FACTS are in order for the utter tools clamoring for Chip Kelly:(1) The same people who post 500 times about Pat Haden, Clay Helton, and blah blah blah are the same idiots who from 2006-2009 wanted Pete Carroll fired for one loss here and one loss there. In other words, no one should even open their posts. It is worse than people happy with ObamaCare; it is a special kind of ignorance and immaturity, hard to find in the real world.(2) Chip Kelly is to defense what I am to science fiction. I am not just “not good at it”; I HATE it! Chip Kelly loathed the only thing that wins in college football. Ask Nick Saban.(3) Nothing says sure thing like a guy who never won a natty, lost almost all big bowl games he was in (one gimme Rose Bowl notwithstanding), lost to US in his best year (2011), and is now best known for being the most obvious termination in the entire NFL in 2015.(4) Chip Kelly wants to stay in the NFL. He had and has no interest in USC. He doesn’t like to recruit, unless he can cheat, which he did at Oregon and got caught and then left. USC hiring a convicted “show cause” cheater? Are you people retarded?I don’t have anything else to say about Chip Kelly. Grow up geniuses.Was Clay Helton a great hire? Time will tell. It doesn’t look like it on paper (I stole that line from a January 2001 piece the whole world wrote on Pete Carroll). He is a risk. Ask the people who are mad about the hire who they wanted. THEY WILL NOT GIVE YOU A NAME. Perhaps they are humbled after seeing their man-crush choices of two years ago make Sark, Kiff, and Clay look like Belichek. Charlie Strong? Good job guys. Chris Petersen – we’ll see how Washington does in the national championship next week. Kevin Sumlin? Is he still employed? These loud mouth idiots are so disingenuous it is pitiful. They protest from the rooftop how sure they were Sark would fail and how bad Clay Helton is, and conveniently forget that ALL THE PEOPLE THEY WANTED HAVE, UMMMMM, NOT LIVED UP TO EXPECTATIONS.A college football coaching hire is luck. Period. Some are bad hires (Paul Hackett). Some are lottery tickets (Pete Carroll). Some make sense on paper; some don’t. Do I think the Clay Helton hire is a slam dunk? No, I do not. Do I suspect the players and recruits wanting him so bad nudged Haden into the easy hire? Yes, I do. But let me tell you a little secret some of you are too dense to understand – he has a 50% chance of succeeding at USC, and if we hired some no name hot shot from Houston or Memphis, he would have a 50% chance too. Maybe less. If you think otherwise, you are wrong. “But he will be with us for FIVE YEARS!!!!!!!!!!”. Enough already. Coaches get fired mid-contract every single day. Right Chip Kelly??????I don’t know if Clay will excel or not. I just know I hope he does. THAT’S CALLED BEING A TROJAN.So Sark is suing for $30 million … Apparently this is somehow Pat Haden’s fault. Ay yi yi. I said the day the Sark stuff blew up that I would know if he was serious about recovery by whether or not he sued the university. Recovery means making amends and accepting responsibility for one’s actions. I think he has committed an unforgivable mistake, and by that I do NOT mean in being alcoholic; I mean in rejecting the path that leads to sobriety and restoration and new highs not thought possible, but instead going for the silly, crass, pitiful route, where his reputation is about to go to new lows. Very disappointed. Drop the suit, Sark. Go to meetings. Find an OC job. And re-climb the ladder. We are a country of suckers for recovery stories and second chances. This frivolous suit is going to kill you more than the abusive drinking.We lost to Stanford because they were better than us. We lost to Wisconsin because we missed by a hair on a couple big throws to JuJu, and our defense was its normal mediocre self. So now we recruit. And then we beat Alabama. It was a tumultuous and highly disappointing season that frankly could’ve been a lot worse. A lot. Fight on players, fight on coaches, may some incredible assistants find their way to Heritage Hall, may Coach Helton prove the haters wrong, who have chosen to take their personal life disappointments out on him, and may USC go to Dallas next year surrounded by the real fans who actually make up this mighty community, not the tools from the cheap seats. FIGHT ON!!!!!!!!!!!!