After several days of buzz that it was in the works, Arizona State officially announced Monday that it has hired Chris Claiborne — the the former USC star linebacker who spent the last year as an offensive quality control analyst for the Trojans — as its linebackers coach.
Claiborne, who won the Butkus Award as college football’s top linebacker in 1998 with the Trojans, had stepped down from the head coaching job at Calabasas HS after the 2019 season to pursue a college coaching career. USC gave him his entry into the ranks, and now he leaves to start climbing the ladder.
While Claiborne’s hiring and now departure elicited strong fan reaction, both for his stature in the history of the program and for his familiarity with the Southern California recruiting scene, this is how it’s supposed to work in the ecosystem of college football.
A respected former player returns to his alma mater and gets his foot in the door and uses that experience to climb to the next rung. A program like USC isn’t usually any coach’s first full-fledged assistant job, while Arizona State has gone all in on prioritizing hiring strong recruiters in spite of experience level. The Sun Devils also hired former USC starter-turned-graduate assistant Chris Hawkins as its defensive backs coach last offseason, in addition to hiring Prentice Gill as wide receivers coach and co-recruiting coordinator after he spent 2016-18 as a GA at USC and 2019 as an offensive analyst at Oregon. ASU also hired Antonio Pierce to its staff as linebackers coach in 2018 (since promoted to defensive coordinator) straight from the high school ranks after his stint as head coach at Long Beach Poly.
USC, meanwhile, brought in Claiborne and fellow former defensive standout Hayes Pullard as analysts in 2020, and both now move on to bigger jobs after a year. Pullard joined the New York Jets last week as an unspecified defensive assistant.
In the case of Claiborne, Arizona State could simply offer him more than USC could at this point. The Trojans do have a vacancy on staff with TEs coach John David Baker joining Ole Miss as its passing game coordinator and TEs coach.
Even if USC wanted to get creative with filling that position, defensive coordinator Todd Orlando coaches the linebackers and has done so traditionally in his defenses.
So Claiborne moves on to a good opportunity to prove himself as a first-time college assistant coach.
Claiborne, who was a first round pick in the 1999 NFL draft and played for the Lions, Vikings, Rams and Giants, also fits into Arizona State’s emphasis on touting the NFL experience of its coaching staff.
