Graham Harrell shares why he couldn't pass up the USC OC job

New USC offensive coordinator Graham Harrell says he wasn't really looking for a new job, even as his stock was on the rise after a productive three-year run as OC at North Texas.

He simply couldn't say no when the Trojans came calling.

“It’s kind of a random deal, honestly," is he how he put it Monday in his first comments since his hiring.

"North Texas is a great place and that’s kind of home for me and my wife, so we were comfortable there," he continued. "It’s close to family. We have a great team coming back, especially offensively. We had a quarterback back at North Texas that was special, he’s going to be a senior. Basically the whole offense is going to be senior[s] so I wasn’t looking for a job at all. I actually turned a couple jobs down because I felt like we had a chance to really be special, and just kind of out of nowhere Coach Helton called me."

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Of course, everyone knows the timeline of events from USC's perspective.

The Trojans and head coach Clay Helton, humbled by a 5-7 season in 2018, set out to find someone who could create a greater sum out of the program's impressive collection of offensive parts. Someone who could jolt some excitement back into the program after all that had transpired.

And they found their man ... for a month before former Texas Tech head coach Kliff Kingsbury was hired away to be the head coach of the Arizona Cardinals.

A few weeks later, they landed on another former Texas Tech QB and Mike Leach disciple, hiring Harrell away from North Texas.

He doesn't have the extensive track record of Kingsbury, but he is young, full of upside and allowed USC to salvage the whole process with a hire that has fans somewhere between intrigued and optimistic.

And he at least said all the right things Monday in his first meeting with the local media.

"USC is a top 5 program ever, and so those jobs don’t come around very often because they’re not open very often. So when a job like that comes around, it’s a lot more interesting than the other job that came around," Harrell said.

(There were reports and rumors linking Harrell to the OC job at North Carolina for a bit before USC came into the picture.)

Harrell said Helton called him on a Tuesday or Wednesday, they talked through the week, he flew out to visit USC on Sunday, was offered the job and accepted that Monday.

“Again, I wasn’t necessarily looking for a job, but a job like this is maybe a once-in-a-career opportunity," Harrell said.

While his hiring was formally announced on Jan. 30 by USC, he wasn't made available for interviews until Monday, when he talked at length about his offensive philosophy and stepping into this rather interesting situation with the Trojans.

Asked if he worried about joining the staff of a head coach many presume to have tenuous job security, he side-stepped the question deftly.

“Not really. All jobs are pressure, right? But my overall attitude is we’re playing football, so I mean at the end of the day, what’s the worst that can happen to you, right?" he said. "We get paid a lot of money to coach a game that you played as a little kid because you loved it, so I don’t ever worry too much about pressure."

He said he believes the USC job affords him one of the few opportunities in the country to compete for a national championship.

That may ring exceptionally optimistic to beleaguered Trojans fans who just watched the team bottom out in the fall and who were clamoring for a total fresh start for the program, but his point is valid. If -- and sure, it's a huge if -- USC rights the ship, perhaps led by Harrell's work on the offensive side, this program will always have the chance to at least dream of the grandest goals and the path to make it happen when things fall in line.

And that can't be said everywhere or most places, as Harrell candidly noted.

"You get into this profession to win championships, and realistically there aren’t many schools in the country that you can win a national championship at — let’s just be honest," he said. "Even Texas Tech when I was there was a great school, we had some great football teams, but everything in the world would have had to fall perfect. You don’t realistically have a chance to win that or we didn’t. If we went 12-0, maybe we play in it, and even still they probably try to keep you out to try to get one of the elite schools in the country in, you know what I mean?

"So there just aren’t that many schools where you feel every year you legitimately have a chance to ... play in big-time bowls, play in the Rose Bowl, play in the playoffs, win the national championship and ‘SC is one of those.”

As as senior at Texas Tech, Harrell led the Red Raiders to a No. 2 national ranking in early November before a loss to No. 5 Oklahoma. They finished 11-2 and ranked No. 12 in the final polls.

Harrell later got his first full-time staff position under his Leach, his former Texas Tech coach, coaching the outside wide receivers at Washington State from 2014-15.

When Seth Littrell, who was the running backs coach at Texas Tech during Harrell's time there, offered him the offensive coordinator position at North Texas, he pounced.

“He let me call [the plays] from day one. That’s one of the main reasons I went because with Coach Leach, where I was, you’re never going to, one, be the quarterback coach, or two, get to call plays and that’s fine — he’s obviously great at what he does. That’s obviously something I wanted to do," Harrell said.

There had been some question as to how the offensive responsibilities were divided at North Texas, with Littrell a successful former coordinator himself.

Harrell answered that Monday.

“Early on especially he was pretty involved like on Monday and game planning and stuff, especially on the run game stuff. That’s how we started it year one — I would game plan the back end, he would try to put together a run game plan and we’d match them together. [Then] he’d go be the head coach and he’d let me be the offensive coordinator," he said. "And as we went, he kind of stepped further and further away from even that just because we’d been together for a while.”

The combination worked.

The Mean Green enjoyed an offensive resurgence under Littrell and Harrell, who inherited a unit that ranked near the bottom of the FBS in 2015 before their arrivals at 15.2 points and 320.1 yards per game. They improved to 24.8 PPG in 2016, 35.5 in 2017 and then 34.6 this past fall, producing offenses that ranked No. 24 (455.1 YPG) and No. 20 (460.5) nationally those last two seasons, respectively.

Now he gets to try to prove he can do it in a different setting, at a different level and with different expectations and pressures.

“I’ve been fortunate. … I don’t think that five years ago I would have said, ‘Yeah, I plan on being at USC in five years,' but I’m excited to be here," he said Monday. "Again, I do feel fortunate. I grew up in a football family so I think that helped. I know it helped getting my job at North Texas and stuff and then the success we had there helped me get to here, but it’s been a fast rise and an exciting one. I’m excited to be here and like I said it’s going to be a fun ride.”