Pyle of List

 Pete Carroll yelled at me.  There I was, standing on the steps of USC’s physical education building on a cool summer night, exhausted after a long day of orientation spent touring the campus and learning about the classes I’d be taking that fall, and being more or less forced to attend a “Spirit Rally.”  Imagine my surprise when the band turned out to be awesome and managed to actually get me excited, causing me to join in the singing and “Fight On”-ing while ignoring how ridiculous I must have looked since I didn’t know any of the lyrics or motions.

And then this man came up to the microphone.  I don’t remember anything he said.  But I do remember that he made me very excited.  About USC in general, sure, but mostly about football.  And I’d never been that excited about it.

The lasting effect wasn’t immediate.  As a freshman, I didn’t even go to all of the home games.  But something caught on.  Much of my love for USC football came from sharing the gameday experience with my friends and from the team itself.  But much more of it came from Pete Carroll.  Jump ahead two years later, my junior year, and I went to ALL the games, home and away, which included trips to Auburn, Notre Dame, and both Arizona schools.  I was hooked.  And it was mostly thanks to the energetic, young at heart, silver fox of a head coach that we had.

And now… he’s gone.

It’s not the wins that I’ll miss, though there were plenty.  Nor the numerous accomplishments that, quite frankly, will never be repeated.  To list all of the amazing things that Carroll did would take too much space and be irrelevant to the point of this post.  (If you want to read about them, go here.)  But they deserve to be acknowledged, not only because of their greatness but also because they go hand-in-hand with the “legend” of Pete Carroll.  That same boyish enthusiasm and revelry wouldn’t be applauded nearly as much had he not been successful.  But success alone would not have endeared him to so many Trojan fans.

Once it became official that he was leaving, my friend worried we’d “hire some guy with a mustache.”  Perhaps he’d be successful and perhaps not.  Be  he wouldn’t be fun.  The circus would be gone.  No more great pranks.  No more celebrity guests.  No more jumps off the high dive.  Carroll was the kind of guy you’d love to have a beer with, except he’d probably turn it into a drinking game and you’d have the night of your life losing to him.  Anyone else would just be a coach.

(Not to delve too deeply into a mostly unrelated topic, but I am fairly excited about the new coaching staff.  Would I take Pete back over them?  Absolutely.  But it’s a pretty good alternative considering the other replacements that were possibilities.)

I’d hoped the day would never come.  And though for awhile it seemed inevitable that he’d be poached by the NFL because of his success, so many years went by, so many offers were rejected, and so much bitterness towards the league was evident in his answers to questions that I had convinced myself that he was going to stay at USC “forever.”  And he could have, too.  He’d earned the right to leave on his own terms, to be granted leniency for losing seasons.  Carroll will still go down as one of the best college football coaches of all time, but he could have cemented himself alongside the likes of Bowden and Paterno.

That is my biggest regret.  There are others, of course.  He was only 3 wins away from having 100.  And I would have rather it happened after the 2008 season, when USC was riding high and could make an argument that it deserved to play in the national title game.  That would have been more appropriate for a coach who constantly called for the need for college playoffs; he’d be headed to a league where you can lose some games and still have a chance to win it all.

And of course, there’s the looming sanctions.  Too many people have declared that Carroll is running away because he knows USC is about to get hit hard.  It might happen, but we’ll have to wait and see.  And even if it does, there’s no way of knowing whether or not Carroll had wind that it was coming.  He’s said that his leaving had nothing to do with the possible sanctions, and I’m inclined to believe him.  After all, it’s not as if he’d turned down a similar opporutnity in the past; this was the first time he was offered so much power in the NFL.

He built the USC empire beause of his desire to “win forever” and his deep competitiveness, so I can’t begrude him wanting to prove himself on the one level he never really succeeded with.  I wish him the best of luck, not only because I love the man but also because it would pain my heart to see him go along the lines of Steve Spurrier, failing in the NFL and returning to a lower level school, never being able to achieve the same level of success that he had before.

But even though I’m not angry at him for leaving, it’s still hard news to take.  As that same friend put it, “it’s like my Dad is retiring from being my Dad.”  He still loves us, his children, but he needs to prove that he can go be a good Dad to these other kids that could really use some help.

But we’re still a family.  And now we have three men to love us and take care of us.  So I guess we’re like the show Full House.  Which was a good show.  But not as great as The Cosby Show.  (Pete Carroll is Billy Cosby in this scenario.)

Okay, I’m stop now.  Goodbye, Pete.  We’ll miss you.  Fight on and win forever!