Is USC Ready to Forgive Pete Carroll for NCAA Sanctions?

To put it simply: Pete Carroll has a complicated relationship with the USC Trojans.

Before Carroll took over the program in 2001, USC had fallen on some hard times. The proud Trojan tradition had taken some lumps and hadn’t brought a national championship to the Coliseum since 1978. More disturbingly to USC fans, the team was struggling to win games against their rivals and didn’t win the Pac 10 or crack the Top 25 for six straight seasons before Carroll turned things around.

But in Year 2 of the Carroll regime, things got turned around in a very big way. Starting in 2002, USC won at least a share of the conference title for seven straight years, finishing no lower than No. 4 in the postseason polls and going 6-1 in BCS bowls, including 4-1 in Rose Bowl games. They won a split national title in 2003 (finishing No. 1 in the AP poll, No. 2 in the coaches poll) and stood alone as BCS National Champions the following season.

This was a run that few teams in the history of college football could have matched. Every season, the Trojans were in the mix for a national title as they ran roughshod through their conference schedule. In 2009, the Trojans were deemed the “Team of the Decade” by multiple news outlets, and deservedly so. They simply ran college football on the West Coast and there wasn’t anyone who could do anything to stop them, it seemed.

However, things would quickly turn on Carroll and the Trojans. An NCAA investigation into the school cited the university for a lack of institutional control in regards to former running back Reggie Bush, a staple of the team’s title runs and the 2005 Heisman Trophy winner. USC was hammered following the four-year investigation in 2010 with a two-year postseason ban, the loss of 30 scholarships over three years, and were forced to vacate all wins which Bush participated in as an “ineligible” player, including the 2005 Orange Bowl where USC won the BCS National Championship. Bush, additionally, was forced to relinquish his Heisman.

That would have been hard enough to swallow as a USC fan as the sanctions have almost universally been panned as an overreach and abuse of power by the NCAA, but things were made even worse when Carroll bolted to the NFL to take over the Seattle Seahawks just months before the sanctions were handed down. That left a lot of people with suspicions about how much Carroll knew about the violations with a bad taste in their mouths.

For years, Carroll has dealt with the reputation of running a dirty program at USC and then running away when he got caught. The Trojans are JUST NOW coming out from under the heavy NCAA sanctions which have hampered their ability to be competitive on the national stage in large part because of the damage the lost scholarships did to their overall depth.

And while USC has struggled from the fallout, Carroll has flourished in Seattle. In five seasons, Carroll has taken the Seahawks to the playoffs four times, including a run to a Super Bowl title in 2013. His hyper-competitive style on the sidelines and willingness to let his players compete for playing time has earned him a reputation as one of the top coaches in the NFL today.

That divergence of fortune has struck many observers as blatantly unfair. If not for his ignorance of the NCAA violations taking place on his team, willful or not, Carroll would not have been such a hot coaching commodity for the NFL and he would not have been able to sign a lucrative deal with Seattle. On paper, it could appear like Carroll used USC to raise his own profile, disregarding NCAA rules while doing so, and then cashed out for a big NFL payday before it all came crashing down around him. So while Carroll was enjoying a Super Bowl parade through the streets of Seattle, USC was still picking up the pieces of his quick exit.

The university, however, seems ready to bury the hatchet. According to the school, Carroll is scheduled to be one of six recipients of honorary degrees during the May 15 graduation ceremony in Los Angeles. The day after that, he’ll be inducted into the school’s athletic hall of fame. That’s a pretty big honor for a man connected to one of the biggest black eyes of the program’s long and illustrious history.

Listing off his accomplishments, of course, it’s easy to see why he would be up for the honor. He turned USC into a premier college football power during the 2000s and rebuilt the Trojan brand into a household name across the nation. We see the effects of that every year during recruiting season when USC ranks among the top recruiting classes in the country, even while dealing with reduced scholarships. It has truly been a testament to the success that Carroll had at USC…on the field at least.

But you simply can’t ignore the fallout from his time as head coach. The Trojans were hit with unprecedented penalties following the NCAA investigation, the harshest levied against a program arguably since the SMU Mustangs got the death penalty. This was likely as close to that level of punishment that the NCAA was ever going to get and it happened under Carroll’s watch.

Carroll, of course, has denied any knowledge of the wrongdoing happening away from the football field and the NCAA investigation didn’t pin anything on him, specifically. But he was still the man in charge of the program as it drove off the cliff no matter how much he knew about what Bush and his family were getting for his services.

If Carroll is getting a pass on this, does that mean that Bush is just a couple years away from vindication at his alma mater as well? Will they put him back in the record books and re-paint his mural in the athletic complex? Can we finally start showing some of Bush’s incredible highlight-reel runs out of the Trojan backfield? If the leader of their darkest hour is going to be honored, will the “agent of their destruction” get a pass as well?

The move is even more confusing when you consider athletic director Pat Haden’s remarks shortly after the scandal broke about wanting to distance the program from these transgressions. That’s when Bush saw his likeness wiped from campus and you would think that Carroll would have been equally blackballed. Up until now, he hasn’t made much of an effort to return to his former place of employment and given the university plenty of distance as they worked through the sanctions.

But while Haden talked about putting distance between the program that committed the transgressions and the current one, he hasn’t done much to back that up outside of erasing Bush from the collective consciousness of USC. Haden has hired two coaches since Carroll left, Lane Kiffin and Steve Sarkisian. Both were assistants under Carroll during his run at USC with each calling plays as the offensive coordinator at some point during their stint there.

Each were integral parts of building the successful program that Carroll oversaw and were arguably just as culpable in the Bush-scandal as the former head coach was. If Haden was truly committed to distancing USC from the scandal-plagued regime, wouldn’t the high-level assistants be personae non gratae when hiring a new head coach?

We saw a similar thing happen with the Penn State Nittany Lions following the Jerry Sandusky scandal and the hap-hazard firing of Joe Paterno. When the school wanted to put distance between themselves and the former regime that was connected to the scandal, they went far outside program to find their next head coach, Bill O’Brien. Even with qualified life-long Penn State coaches already at the school, the university made the call to completely separate themselves from the Paterno coaching tree and start fresh.

Of course, the two scandals that these schools went through couldn’t be more different. The similarity is in how the schools talked about putting “distance” between themselves and the scandals once they started the process of “moving on” from them.

And here might be the reason why USC is so quick to forgive Carroll and welcome him back to campus. The University of Southern California holds itself to a very high standard of excellence in many arenas, but especially in college football. The struggles that the team went through before Carroll took over were a trying time for a program unaccustomed to finishing seasons unranked and barely bowl eligible.

Carroll, for all his flaws, returned the Trojans to their winning tradition. He made them the team of the decade, even! That feeling of being on top of college football and winning are the lasting legacy of Carroll now and the Trojans have never stopped trying to chase that. They continue to bring key parts of the Carroll regime to replicate that system, though they have not yet succeeded.

At the end of the day, it’s easier for the school to put the blame on a single player like Bush while continuing to allow the gatekeepers during the scandal to lead the program because they might be able to recapture that magic that made USC the team of the decade in the 2000s. As long as they can win like that again, they won’t hold any past transgressions against that coaching staff.

So perhaps that’s why it’s so easy for USC to forgive and honor Pete Carroll…because they never blamed him in the first place and would have liked him to stay there forever, so long as he was winning.

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