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Happiness Is a Warm Football Coach
Published in Play, The New York Times Sports Magazine
November 2, 2008
On the second Saturday in
September, U.S.C. football coach Pete Carroll stood along the
sideline at the Los Angeles Coliseum, hands on his knees in an
infielder’s crouch, poised to dash onto the field as the clock ran
down on his team’s thorough domination of Ohio State. Behind
Carroll, his players hopped up and down and swatted each other on
their helmets. The game had begun in late-afternoon sunshine but was
ending in the glow of the stadium lights. Some of the players had
started to mix with the celebrities Carroll regularly invites to
watch from field level — on this night, Denzel Washington, Jamie
Foxx, Nick Lachey, Christian Slater, the N.B.A. players Greg Oden
and Amare Stoudemire and the U.S.C. football immortals Ronnie Lott,
Marcus Allen and Sam “Bam” Cunningham.
“We own this city when we do it right, boys,” Carroll would tell his
players in one early-season team meeting. “And it’s huge. It’s L.A.!
Hollywood! It’s all that. It’s the Trojans!”
Of all our major sporting enterprises, college football is the one
that leaves the least margin for error. Just one misstep over the
course of an entire season, one ill-timed loss, can disqualify a top
program from the ultimate goal: a national championship. The leading
coaches tend toward paranoia, closing their practices lest any spies
catch a glimpse of their secret plays. They wall off their players
and themselves to avoid distraction and concentrate on the grim task
at hand. Carroll, by method and temperament, is an oddball. He
builds into each week’s game preparation a certain amount of
hilarity — what he calls “giddiness.” He embraces distraction and
makes it his ally. (A few years ago, the rapper Snoop Dogg showed up
at practice and was invited to run some pass patterns.)
At the final whistle of U.S.C.’s 35-3 victory over Ohio State,
Carroll, who is 57 and slim and fit enough to still play pick-up
basketball in the off-season, charged out toward midfield. He had no
phalanx of state troopers guarding him, as some Southern coaches do.
No assistant coaches. No media handlers. He found the Ohio State
coach Jim Tressel and shook his hand, then lost himself amid the
swarm of players, camera crews, celebrities with sideline passes,
fans who had made their way past security, real and would-be rappers
and gangstas in baggy jeans and backward-facing caps who live hard
by U.S.C.’s urban campus and are drawn to Carroll’s Trojans.
Carroll gave big bear hugs to anyone within reach. It was impossible
to say how many of the recipients he actually knew. His blue eyes
seemed almost to vibrate, as if they were considering what direction
he might head in next. He turned and sprinted to the Coliseum’s east
end zone and faced the U.S.C. band and pumped his fist to the music.
Carroll, a Marin County boy drawn to New Age philosophies,
contributed a foreword to the most recent edition of W. Timothy
Gallwey’s classic “Inner Game of Tennis.” In it, he wrote that
athletes “must clear their minds of all confusion and earn the
ability to let themselves play freely.” At this moment, he seemed to
be celebrating freely, in some zone of his own. Euphoria. Rapture.
Oneness with all Trojans — dead, living and unborn. He was Gallwey’s
“Self 2” (not the overthinking Self 1), given over to feelings of
harmony, contentment and peace. (In such a state, uniformed security
is a total buzz kill.) Carroll pirouetted away from the band and ran
more than 100 yards back through the mob to the tunnel leading to
the Trojans’ locker room, the whole way rubbing shoulders with
anyone who wanted to get close to him.
Ohio State, participants in the last two national championship
games, had come into the game ranked No. 5 in the nation, and the
showdown against U.S.C., No. 1 at the time, was billed as the game
of the regular season in college football. The media would frame the
rout as a coronation, leaving just one question: who would the
Trojans play in college football’s championship game in Miami in
January? Once Carroll finally made his way off the field, he told
the press: “When we prepare this well and we have our guys, we’re
hard to beat, and it doesn’t matter who we play when we do that.
That’s the standard that we live with.” He said his players had not
even “tried too hard” — an echo of Gallwey’s injunctions to prepare
obsessively, then play in a relaxed, confident state. But it sounded
cocky.
Twelve days later, after a bye week, the picture changed abruptly.
In the game that followed the Ohio State triumph, U.S.C. suffered a
hideous loss in Corvallis, Ore., to lightly regarded Oregon State.
It let a 5-foot-7 freshman — 5-foot-7! A veritable elf by the
standards of big-time college football — amass 186 rushing yards.
That season of destiny? Think of an expensive new sports car that
coasts out of the dealership, slams into a freeway pileup and has to
be towed into a body shop. It’s not tragic, exactly, but it’s so
sudden and deflating.
Carroll told me of the turbulent night he spent after the loss. “You
can’t separate from it,” he said. “You can’t focus on anything of
any meaning at all. You finally get to sleep, but you keep waking up
and asking yourself, Did this really happen?”
THE WEEK LEADING UP to U.S.C.’s next game after the Oregon State
debacle — an Oct. 4 contest at the Coliseum against the University
of Oregon — was a fascinating time to watch Carroll at work. The
coming opponent had won four of its first five games and was
averaging 47 points a game and 308 yards rushing. If the Trojans
won, they would stay in contention for a national championship; a
loss would put U.S.C. on a downward trajectory reminiscent of the
years before Carroll arrived. Over the last six full seasons, his
teams have compiled a 70-8 record — giving Carroll the highest
winning percentage for any active coach who has been around for a
while — and won two national championships and every Pac-10 title.
But for the second consecutive season, the Trojans had experienced
an incomprehensible loss. Carroll says he does not pay attention to
the Las Vegas odds. But the fact remained: U.S.C. was a 25-point
favorite against Oregon State. Even worse, Stanford beat U.S.C. last
season when the Trojans were favored by as many as 41 points, or
about seven touchdowns. No coach likes to have stink bombs like
those on his résumé. They suggest overconfidence or some lack of
preparation, effort or focus.
In his initial season at U.S.C., the team finished 6-6. Since then,
praise for Carroll has been abundant and questions about his
coaching acumen just about nonexistent. The latest loss, though, had
the potential to end his long period of grace. “Do you ever wonder
when someone is going to start holding U.S.C. coach Pete Carroll’s
feet to the fire for these inexplicable losses?” Tom Dienhart, a
senior writer for Rivals.com, posted on its college-football Web
site. “Yes, Carroll has national championships, but is it O.K. for
the coach with arguably the most talented roster in the country to
annually lose games he isn’t supposed to? Just wondering.”
In the wake of the Oregon State loss, would Carroll cut off the fun?
Browbeat his players and put them through a miserable week of pure,
humorless hell? In other words, would he become more like a normal
coach?
He gathered his players in the amphitheater one floor above their
dressing room to lay out the week’s challenge. The seats were too
small for their big bodies, and the room, in contrast to some of the
lavish accommodations elsewhere in college football, was
utilitarian.
Carroll varied his emotional pitch. At times, he sounded like a
color commentator on a pregame telecast, explaining the strengths
and weaknesses of the opponent and radiating excitement about the
game. “This is a really cool match-up,” he said. “They’re 4 and 1.
We need to get these guys.” He implored them to play in the moment,
meaning they couldn’t replay last week’s game. “This is the only
game we get to play right now.” He called out a few players by name
who because of injuries to others would be getting their first shot
at significant playing time. “You came here to play,” he said to
one. “This is what you’ve been waiting for. Let’s make your move for
it.”
No one who knows Carroll would say that Tough Guy is his primary
mode, but he can do it. He singled out one player who earned two
senseless personal-foul penalties against Oregon State. “He’s not
starting! He’s gotta sit down! You gotta learn a lesson! You lose
what you got!” (There were a few unprintable words too.)
Unlike many others at his level of sport, Carroll does not live
fully within a bubble. His charitable foundation, “A Better L.A.,”
is defined on Carroll’s Web site as “a nonprofit organization
committed to transforming the city of Los Angeles.” It seeks to
reduce the culture of violence in the city, often employing ex-gang
members, and works with an outfit called the Pacific Institute to
introduce “next-level thinking” — the language of hope rather than
despair. Carroll himself has a deep personal involvement. As often
as twice a month, he drives late at night into crime-ridden and
gang-infested neighborhoods to demonstrate his personal commitment
and, as he has said, “just to show that someone cares.”
It’s always a mistake, though, to assume that a coach with a wider
view of the world has gone soft at his competitive core. Different
as Carroll may be from many of his peers, he is, like most of them,
a football lifer and denizen of the film room. A defensive whiz,
he’s endlessly obsessed with the challenge of stopping opposing
offenses.
He played for Pacific University in the early 1970s, tried
unsuccessfully to make it as a defensive back in the pros, then
began a long coaching odyssey: 10 years as an assistant at five
different colleges and 16 seasons with five N.F.L. teams as an
assistant coach, defensive coordinator and, for two brief stints,
head coach. He is married to a former volleyball player from
Pacific, and the oldest of their three children, Brennan, works for
him as an assistant coach. Carroll’s youthfulness obscures how long
he’s been around. He was on the staff of the Minnesota Vikings under
Bud Grant, a relic from another era. Carroll had been out of
coaching for almost a year when the U.S.C. job opened up in 2000,
and he landed it only after several more prominent candidates made
it clear they weren’t interested. The once-mighty U.S.C. program had
fallen so far in the previous half-dozen years, winning only a few
more games than it lost, that the Coliseum was half-empty for some
games. In Los Angeles, unlike many of the great college football
towns around America, there’s a lot more to do than root for a
losing team. An unnamed college coach, quoted in The Los Angeles
Times, explained the lack of interest by saying, “It’s a mediocre
job.”
And Carroll, who aggressively pursued the position, was considered
by many of the Trojan faithful to be a mediocre choice at best. Part
of the reason was the perception that he was a failure as a head
coach in the N.F.L. That is not accurate. He led the New York Jets
for just one season before being fired. In three seasons in New
England, he twice took the Patriots to the playoffs. There were
whispers that he wasn’t tough enough with players and that some of
his idiosyncrasies — riding a bicycle to work; organizing
touch-football games for his players — were too eccentric and
laid-back-California for the N.F.L. But plenty of standard-issue
coaches, dour and militaristic, have come and gone in the league
without getting to the playoffs.
Still, Carroll’s relatively modest N.F.L. accomplishments and his
grand success at U.S.C. strongly suggest that he is better suited to
a college setting. This is not a subject he likes going into,
because it implies that he washed out of the N.F.L. or couldn’t
succeed if he ever decided to return. “He was unbranded when he came
here,” says David Carter, a professor of sports business at U.S.C.’s
Marshall School of Business and the executive director of its Sports
Business Institute. “He quickly did a 180-degree turnaround. This is
a personality-driven market, and he’s the most popular sports
personality in Southern California.”
One reason for Carroll’s success with college players is his pure,
joyous physicality. He runs everywhere during practice. He gets in
the middle of drills. He throws a football throughout practice and
usually has at least one junior staff member assigned to be on the
other end of his permanent game of catch. He once demonstrated how a
ball carrier should score from a few yards out by taking a handoff
himself and diving into the end zone, landing on his back. “The guys
didn’t know whether to catch him or hit him,” says Daryl Gross, who
as an associate athletic director at U.S.C. was instrumental in
Carroll’s hiring. (Gross is now the athletic director at Syracuse.)
I walked in on Carroll late one night in his second-floor office in
the athletics building. He was watching film of Oregon, with Neil
Young blasting in the background while he fingered a baseball bat as
if it were a guitar. He looked blissfully happy.
Everyone around Carroll — and Carroll himself — talks casually of
his attention-deficit disorder. It has never been formally
diagnosed; it’s just assumed. There’s a school of thought in the
psychological community that A.D.D. is a gift, or can be, and
Carroll, informally, is an adherent. “I like to say A.D.D. is a
beautiful thing and I never get bored,” he told me. “I’m sort of
joking, but there are some benefits to having a mind that allows you
to juggle a whole bunch of different things. You can talk to me for
five minutes and be telling me something, but I’m going to pick up
the essence of what you’re saying, and the rest of it I might not
seem like I hear. But I get it, or I get what I need. It’s just that
I might also be doing something else at the time while you’re
talking” — which he admits can drive people crazy. Perhaps, but it’s
a lot more likely to bother an adult than someone the age of
Carroll’s players. High energy? Easily distracted? That pretty much
defines them.
“HUP, HUP, HUP!” Carroll yelped happily as he ran with his players
on the practice field, leading them from one drill to the next.
Athletes sometimes say that a game, especially a championship
contest or some other highly anticipated match-up, seemed “fast” —
it whizzed by like a video on fast forward, sometimes too quickly
for them to keep their composure and perform properly. For this
reason, Carroll runs practices at warp speed so that the games will
seem slower. No one walks. Drills begin and end quickly.
The voices that carried on the field were the booming baritones of
the assistant coaches Ken Norton Jr. and Todd McNair, both former
N.F.L. players, and Pat Ruel, a longtime college and N.F.L.
assistant. From the sideline, I rarely heard Carroll. He is a
tweaker, moving from player to player to engage in short one-on-one
conversations, usually having to do with positioning or technique.
“The other coaches get us lined up,” Clay Matthews, a senior
defensive end, explained to me. “Coach Carroll is the one who
watches and makes the necessary changes if we’re not doing it
right.”
By the Monday before the Oregon game, the U.S.C. coaches had already
spent hours watching film. They were not overly worried about the
offense being able to score. Oregon played aggressively against the
run and, as offensive coordinator Steve Sarkisian put it, left their
cornerbacks “on an island” without help, making them vulnerable to
U.S.C.’s N.F.L.-caliber receivers.
The big concern was Oregon’s wide-open, spread offense, which was
full of the kind of trickery that could result in half the defense
tackling a guy without the football while the actual ball carrier
scooted off in the other direction. Carroll’s U.S.C. teams had
struggled against just such offenses in the past, most notably in
the national-championship game after the 2005 season, when the
University of Texas and its mobile quarterback, Vince Young, beat
the Trojans.
After practice, Carroll and his defensive coaches spent hours
watching more video — mostly of the just-concluded practice session,
in which the U.S.C. defense faced a simulated Oregon attack. Carroll
lounged with his feet hanging over the side of a leather desk chair
and controlled the remote. They all watched the same play
repeatedly, gauging the positioning of each player. The goal was to
figure out how to align their players so that they filled every gap
and would not get “gashed” by running plays. Carroll is a relentless
simplifier. It was just as important to settle on terminology to
give to the players so that the adjustments would not seem
unfamiliar. He wanted them to be able to react rather than think.
At about 10 p.m., Carroll, in celebration, hurled a marker against a
wall. “O.K.,” he said, “we got a defense for the ball game. Now
we’re ballin’!”
HOW YOU DOIN’ academically? You keepin’ up with your class work?”
Carroll was in the common room of the coaches’ suite, a space with
comfy leather furniture and a big-screen TV. Practice had just
ended, and the coaches were eating dinner out of plastic containers
while making recruiting calls to high-school players.
“Is your mom there?” Carroll asked one kid. He paused while she got
on the phone. “Hey, Mom, what’s happenin’?” He couldn’t get away
from the Oregon State loss. A surprising number of these kids and
their parents wanted to engage him on the unpleasant topic of how it
possibly could have happened, as sure a sign as any that Carroll’s
coaching halo may not be quite as firmly in place as it has been.
“We ran into a hornet’s nest up there,” Carroll answered cheerfully
enough. “But we’re bouncing back.”
The cellphones were passed around like they were part of some
multiple handoff play. “Coach Sark wants to say hello,” Todd McNair
said as he handed his phone over to the offensive coordinator Steve
Sarkisian. I was struck that even during such an important week,
after an awful loss, recruiting retained its high priority. But the
talent pipeline has to be kept filled.
U.S.C. under Carroll has had its share of off-field issues, as
nearly every major program does. (Bringing young men to campus
specifically because they excel at a violent game pretty much
ensures that.) But by far the biggest blemish during Carroll’s
tenure has been the ongoing investigation into allegations that the
former running back Reggie Bush and his family accepted some
$300,000 in cash and goods from a California businessman, in
violation of N.C.A.A. rules. Bush could have to give up his Heisman
Trophy; U.S.C. could have to forfeit wins from 2004 and 2005.
Not every head coach likes recruiting, and some hate it and turn as
much of it as possible over to their assistants. Carroll likes
meeting kids and their families, likes the competition of the chase
— it’s another thing he can win at — and he relishes the opportunity
to choose his own talent, which he could not do in the N.F.L. He
sometimes refers to himself as “coach and general manager” at U.S.C.
He’s got plenty to offer, of course: the U.S.C. tradition, Southern
California weather and glamour, a team that’s always on TV and
contends for national championships and even the possibility that a
player doesn’t have to crack the U.S.C. starting lineup to play in
the N.F.L. (Matt Cassell, who stepped in at quarterback this season
for the New England Patriots after Tom Brady was injured, never
started a game at U.S.C. while serving as a backup to Carson Palmer
and Matt Leinart. At least five other U.S.C. players in recent
seasons have signed on with N.F.L. teams without ever having been
regular starters.)
Carroll can choose from among the top-rated or “five star” recruits
and for most of his tenure has attracted one of the top-rated
recruiting classes in the nation. That increases the likelihood of —
and high expectations for — lots of victories, but when U.S.C.
underachieves, you can’t help wonder what elements of character and
competitiveness the team may be sacrificing when it passes on
certain second-tier prospects.
“Do you think we’d even recruit Troy now?” Steve Sarkisian said to
Carroll one night after practice, referring to Troy Polamalu, now
with the Pittsburgh Steelers. It was a question that would surprise
most fans, because Polamalu is one of the N.F.L.’s top defensive
players, but as Sarkisian explained to me later, “Troy was really
small, more so than the guys we’re looking at now.”
Carroll never answered Sarkisian directly, but the question
resonated because it was more than just about Polamalu. The subtext
was clear: all this talent on the team, and yet they have lost to
kids who, by and large, would not be considered worthy U.S.C.
recruits. Later in the evening, Carroll said to Sarkisian: “You know
what — if we’d played Clay the whole game, we would have won.”
Clay Matthews, who described his recruiting status out of high
school to me as as “N.A. — not applicable,” came to U.S.C. as a
nonscholarship walk-on, but he was emerging as one of the team’s
most dependable defensive players. In the coming game against
Oregon, Carroll planned to play him almost every down.
NOT JUST COLLEGE FOOTBALL but also U.S.C. in particular may suit
Carroll in ways that even he may not have realized when he took the
job. A private university in downtown Los Angeles, it is an
intimate, urban campus. The buildings are close together and the
streets and pedestrian walkways that crisscross campus are narrow.
Between his office and the practice field, Carroll must weave
through students walking or bicycling to and from class. He passes a
music practice hall, and on any given day might hear a violinist
sitting on a bench and rehearsing or a vocalist singing as she
walks. Carroll stops for conversations, poses for pictures, signs
whatever is put in front of him. It can easily take him 20 minutes
to make the short walk from field back to office.
He makes at best a minimal effort to limit access to his practices.
Someone at the gate checks those coming in, but I never saw anyone
denied entrance, and his sideline is typically filled with fans,
faculty, students, local pee-wee football teams, retirees, mothers
pushing baby carriages.
At midweek before the Oregon game, a boyhood friend of Carroll’s,
Dave Perron, materialized. Perron, who made the unusual journey from
first-grade teacher to media-relations director of the Oakland A’s
and now works on charitable projects for the financier Michael
Milken, is part of an informal group that calls itself Team Pete and
is interested in gaining attention for Carroll’s off-field
philanthropy and teaching methods.
“The big key to understanding Pete is where he came from,” he said.
“Marin County. Northern California. Remember, we’re talking the
’60s. That’s where the social concern began. The interest in
relating to people. The interest in music. The Dead. Jefferson
Airplane. Janis Joplin. That’s the beat of his life.” (Carroll
listens over the Internet to KFOG in San Francisco, which would make
him just another old guy grooving to classic rock, but Perron
thought it was something important to know about him.) Carroll’s “E.Q.,”
as Perron put it, meaning his emotional intelligence, “is off the
charts. He relates. He empathizes. He reads people in a moment’s
time.”
Late in the week, Carroll and his staff began a carefully
orchestrated emotional buildup to the game. It may in fact have been
a demonstration of Carroll’s high E.Q. I was surprised how much
silliness was involved — laughter, clowning, music, dancing.
In a team meeting after practice on Friday, McNair, the boisterous
running-backs coach, led a kind of singalong that seemed to consist
mostly of chanting and gibberish. A visiting coach from a college
football team in Japan, who is spending the season with U.S.C., was
invited up front for motivational remarks, which he delivered in
Japanese and the few English words at his disposal. It’s a weekly
ritual. The players stood and cheered like it was the funniest thing
they had ever heard.
Carroll then came forward to offer some seemingly counterintuitive
thoughts that translated, basically, as, A moment of great
importance is approaching, so keep on laughing. “I want you to
listen really carefully now,” he said. “I don’t think there’s any
doubt — in my mind, the other coaches’ minds and your mind — that
you can feel it. There’s a pressure about this game. There’s a
stress about this game. No doubt. That’s why we’re so giddy. Let’s
keep the fun going, because this is serious.”
THE PLAYERS and coaches checked into a hotel on Friday night, as
they do the night before every home game, and Carroll abruptly
changed the tone. He let his assistant coaches take the lead at a
team meeting, and they were emotional — and also sounded angrier
than I ever heard Carroll. Anger is not his thing. He leaves it to
others.
For the first time all week, the Oregon State fiasco was overtly
referenced. “I didn’t say it last week, and I [expletive] should
have,” the defensive coordinator, Nick Holt, told the team. “It’s
about us knocking the [expletive] out of people. It’s always about
that. Tackling, tackling, [expletive] tackling. . . . Chase the
[expletive] football. That’s what we do. . . . That’s what sets us
apart, is our physicalness and our swarm. And we waited too long
last week to do what we do. And I took it for granted! I took it for
[expletive] granted!”
Ken Norton Jr. made a primitive appeal to the masculinity of the
young Trojans. The Los Angeles Coliseum was their house. No man
likes his house to be “invaded” or “penetrated,” he said, and they
could not allow it.
Carroll’s approach was emotional but upbeat. He talked about the
great history of U.S.C. football. Did everyone in the room really
understand it? Embrace it? “Your life will never be more meaningful
or fun than it is right now,” he said, a somewhat dubious thing to
tell young adults, with its implication that all that follows will
be anticlimax. “We need to draw on what this feels like and what
this means to us.”
When he asked his assistant coaches to talk about what being at
U.S.C. meant, Pat Ruel, a bear of an offensive line coach and the
most macho-seeming of those on Carroll’s staff, appeared ready to
break down in tears before he could finish. He said that after a
long coaching career, his four years at U.S.C. had been his best in
football. “You be there for me,” he told the team, “and I’ll be
there for you.”
SURPRISINGLY, the next morning, game day, was an occasion for more
hilarity. Carroll seemed to be taking his young players up and down
a ladder. They had been kept loose early in the week. Then their
manhood had been challenged and their sense of tradition excited.
They’d been brought to a hush and, perhaps some of them, close to
tears by Ruel. Now they were back in the hotel meeting room —
singing, dancing, chanting, bouncing off each other like overlarge
toddlers in a playpen. Some of the players took their shirts off, as
if they were about to brawl. But it was all just too ridiculous to
seem menacing.
Soon, they would board the bus for the Coliseum. One of Carroll’s
aides, a young member of Team Pete and the guy who runs his Web
site, said if I came onto the field during warm-ups I could run up
the tunnel and into the locker room with the team so I could hear
the pregame talk. I’ll admit it was a thrill. I was a U.S.C. fan in
my youth. I loved all those great running backs, including, yes, O.
J. Simpson. Now I was going to run through the Coliseum with the
Cardinal and Gold. As I did, I didn’t even realize Carroll was
behind me until a security guy tried to stop me at the entrance to
the team’s dressing room.
“He’s with us,” Carroll said. “I don’t even know why I’m saying
that, but he’s with us.” He punched me on the arm, perhaps for the
third or fourth time that day. He was like a kid, all excited. It
was game day.
Over the previous week, I had seen a supremely talented group of
football players go through a week of focused preparation. They had
been brought to a physical and emotional peak. In the locker room,
as Carroll reminded his team one last time of the game’s importance
and they gathered around him in a huge huddle, I was thinking, I’m
glad I’m not an Oregon Duck.
OREGON MADE THINGS tense for a time. The Ducks scored the first
touchdown and kept the game close for a quarter. Then, everything
that Carroll and his coaches had drawn up — the challenge to those
Oregon cornerbacks left by themselves on an island; the defensive
adjustments; the energized, swarming tacklers — began to work
beautifully.
Mark Sanchez, the Trojan quarterback, completed three second-quarter
touchdown passes, including long throws of 34 and 63 yards. A 10-10
game ended in a 44-10 U.S.C. victory. Oregon was held to just 60
yards rushing, 248 below its average. Kevin Ellison, a hard-hitting
safety who had been moved closer to the line of scrimmage to stop
the run, made 12 tackles in the first half.
But after the game, Carroll didn’t say much about the tactical
adjustments. All he wanted to talk about was the emotional night in
the team hotel and how that had brought the Trojans to a greater
sense of purpose. He said he had come to realize, perhaps one week
too late, that some of his younger players were not bonded deeply
enough to the past. They didn’t know about all the U.S.C. greats who
had preceded them, the stakes of the game, as it were. Every game.
“We have a chance to be a nice football team,” Carroll added, a much
more understated appraisal than he offered after the soaring win
over Ohio State.
But his essential confidence was unshaken. “Just be who we are,” he
told his team. It’s interesting advice. Lesser-talented teams
sometimes need to be more than who they are. In the postgame locker
room, Carroll led his boys in singing “Fight On,” the team song,
instructing them to sing loud so the Oregon players could hear it in
their dressing room nearby. He talked about preparing just as
intensely for the next game, but he couldn’t remember right then who
they were playing. He referred to the upcoming opponent as
“whoever’s coming in here next week.” In Pete Carroll’s world, it
doesn’t really matter.[?][?][?]
Copyright © 2008
Michael Sokolove
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