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We normally start the daily column with a poll question, but we'll hold off this time as the results of our last poll get the full focus today with an extended column adding our perspective on what's happened within USC football the last five months.
The polls are in ...
We asked fans to give their approval rating for the offseason job executed by new athletic director Mike Bohn, senior associate AD Brandon Sosna and Co., on a scale of 1-10.
The results were overwhelmingly favorable. Of the 61 responses as of 6 p.m. PT Thursday, a leading 29.5 percent (18 votes) graded the new athletics administration a "9," while 12 voted for a "7," 11 voted for a "10," and 9 voted for an "8." That's 82 percent of respondents giving an approval rating of 7 or higher.
Four graded the new leadership at a "1," with one vote each going to "2-4" and two votes each for "5" and "6." (I did not vote in this one as a matter of objectivity covering the athletic department).
I was surprised by the results, but only for the perspective of how unlikely such a response would have seemed back in December. It's been a little more than five months since the much-scrutinized decision to retain Clay Helton as head coach and build up the program around him (rather than eat a sizable buyout and start over entirely). Just five months since the apogee of fan angst, the peak of protest.
As reflected by the poll results, it's been a very productive five months.
I'm not going to re-litigate the Helton decision here. That will remain a non-negotiable matter for some/many, hence the handful of low scores, while others noted in the comments to the poll thread that they still don't agree with the decision but seem willing to give Bohn and Co. some benefit of the doubt as to the motivating factors while appreciating the progress made otherwise.
What I will say on that is my sources have steadily told me in recent months that the other investments/upgrades made to the staff and program do not necessarily equate to any long-term decisions about Helton, and that the progress of the program would be evaluated this season with all options on the table. Certainly, the hope is for a successful year on the field to make that a moot matter, but the message has been that the leadership believes the expectations for the program are clear. (What I don't yet know is how this pandemic and the corresponding financial toll it's taking on the department factors into that equation, if at all.)
But back to those other investments, let's recap what has developed since December and following that forgettable Holiday Bowl.
First, flashback to last spring when Eric Ziskin, a longtime pivotal cog in USC's already undermanned recruiting efforts, left the program to pursue other interests. He was the second key recruiting staffer in a handful of months -- along with Alex Rios -- to leave, at least in part, because of the toll of the unseemly hours demanded by the circumstances of the job.
At that time, I asked Helton if there was any potential of expanding the recruiting staff in the near future to better match up with the programs USC recruits against. He intimated that was not expected and deftly wiggled out of the question while not making an issue out of those lagging resources or why the matter hadn't been better addressed.
Enter Bohn, who was hired in early November to replace Lynn Swann as AD. He's commented previously that he had conversations with Helton almost immediately upon arriving regarding the program's most pressing needs.
"His first response was, 'Well, no one's ever asked me that before,'" Bohn told TrojanSports.com in February. "But his immediate response, we started talking about recruiting, so obviously that was a hot-button for both of us and we had to address that."
**Read our in-depth feature on Mike Bohn's overall strategy and plan for USC football**
I've talked to multiple people within the football program who have, unprompted, made a point to highlight the initiative Bohn and Sosna took in addressing the understaffing issue in the recruiting department, along with other changes. (USC also created two additional analyst positions to augment the on-field staff, though the spots have not yet been officially filled due to the ongoing hiring freeze).
To add perspective, here's what Trojans offensive analyst Seth Doege, who played at Texas Tech and coached at Bowling Green before joining the USC staff last year, said recently about his first impressions of the program's obvious needs:
"To be honest, I was kind of blown away, because when you first get here at USC you think you have all the resources in the world. Which, you have a ton of them when it comes to staff, but just talking to some buddies that are on staffs like Alabama or Clemson or some major programs and you hear about stories of how many people they have in their recruiting department and their creative design department and just the support staff as a whole, you start looking around our office and you're like, 'Man, we are at a disadvantage here,'" Doege said. "And then I think what changed it the most, I think when Mike Bohn was hired I think he realized that really quickly."
Identifying the problem was step one -- addressing it was obviously even more important.
So the very next day after the deflating Holiday Bowl loss to Iowa, the process of making-over USC football officially began in earnest.
What the fans saw publicly as the first dominoes of change were the prompt dismissals of defensive coordinator Clancy Pendergast and special teams coordinator John Baxter the day after that bowl loss. Meanwhile, behind the scenes Sosna met with assistant AD/football chief of staff Joseph Wood that same day for a marathon discussion that ran several hours and covered everything that was lacking or in need of change within the program.
Subsequent meetings followed, with USC director of player personnel Spencer Harris -- who manages the recruiting department -- joining in to offer his thoughts on what an ideal recruiting staff would look like and the most paramount needs for the Trojans to better compete against programs with significantly larger recruiting/creative staffs.
"Really, it was Mike and Brandon coming here and asking coach that question," Harris told us recently. "I came from Washington, and in my position we're always kind of evaluating what other schools are doing and what other schools have -- what would be my ideal staff structure? If I had unlimited money, unlimited resources, what would I want it to look like? Once Brandon got here, him, myself and Joseph Wood kind of sat in a room and white-boarded it out and made some decisions on what we needed to add to be the best recruiting department in the country. It's not done yet because of this hiring freeze"
Sosna, who spent two years managing the Cleveland Browns' salary cap and has been a driving force for many of these changes behind the scenes, then got creative with the budget and found a way to make it all work.
That led to a plan of taking a department with five full-time staffers and adding initially five and then ultimately six more positions. Five have been filled and one graphic designer left in the meantime, leaving two more hires still to some. But so far, USC has added new director of graphic design Alex Verdugo, director of high school relations Armond Hawkins Jr., assistant director of player personnel Drew Fox (promoted from graduate assistant) and the two high-profile videographers hired away from LSU this week -- Jacob Brown and Will Stout.
That leaves a director of football marketing and branding, and another graphic designer still to be hired.
What exactly do those additions mean?
Well, one of the main goals for the restructuring of the recruiting department was to move away from having people bogged down by multiple responsibilities while allowing them instead to specialize fully on their areas of expertise. For instance, one of USC's lead talent evaluators has had to also manage the program's official Twitter account due to the understaffing, while interns have had to play a prominent role in producing the graphics that fuel that social media content and go out to recruits to help establish a presence for the program.
That will change once all the planned hires are in place, but so far here's what the new additions have meant:
-At least one prominent local high school coach commented to us in recent years that he was surprised USC's staff didn't have a more consistent presence around his program. Ziskin, who was wearing many hats for the department and watching countless hours of film identifying prospects USC should recruit, was also in many cases the main point of contact between the Trojans and high schools before his departure. The hiring of Hawkins as director of HS relations is to make sure that communication is never lacking again. It's his sole job and focus to constantly be in communication with high school coaches, recruits, their parents, their 7-on-7 coaches or anyone else important to their recruitment.
-Fox's promotion gives USC three full-time talent evaluators along with Harris and Trey Johnson to do the exhaustive preliminary work of finding the talent for the coaches to pursue.
-Verdugo and the eventual second graphic designer to be hired will allow the Trojans to better compete on social media platforms. When I've been asked why that matters, I say this -- if everybody is maintaining a presence on that platform you don't want yours to be noticeably lagging behind. It's a valuable marketing opportunity for a program.
-The yet-to-be-hired director of football marketing and branding will provide the general game plan and coordination for those efforts, including overseeing the new videographers who made a name for themselves producing viral hype videos during LSU's run to the national championship last year.
-Believe it or not, USC did not have a football-specific creative video team before this -- there was a general director of video production (Rich Rodriguez) and his staff working on behalf of the entire athletic department at large. In comparison, LSU, where Brown and Stout are coming from, had both an internal football creative video team (producing creative content for staff use in-house) and an external football creative video team.
All of the behind-the-scenes upgrades have been key, but they only matter if the staff is doing its part as well.
In what can be judged so far, the overhaul of the defensive staff has paid early dividends in recruiting as USC has landed three highly-coveted safeties -- 4-stars Anthony Beavers and Calen Bullock and 3-star Xamarion Gordon, who has the potential to get the bump to a 4-star as well. The Trojans signed no defensive backs of any kind last recruiting cycle.
More to the point, there is a renewed vigor emanating from the staff. That's not our observation -- that's what recruits have been buzzing about since a pivotal on-campus junior day at the end of January set the tone for a new perception for the program. It's reflected in the results, as USC is up to No. 6 in the Rivals recruiting rankings with 10 commits -- including seven 4-stars and five Rivals250 prospects. The Trojans signed just two 4-stars and only one Rivals250 prospect last cycle, as if anyone needed to be reminded.
The additions of Todd Orlando as a defensive coordinator who is also an engaged recruiter (unlike his predecessor), safeties coach and aggressive recruiter Craig Naivar, the poaching of ace recruiter Donte Williams away from Oregon and high-upside recruiter Vic So'oto from Virginia have collectively had the desired early impact, with plenty of buzz that more big-time commits are on the way as well. New special teams coordinator Sean Snyder, meanwhile, will get a chance to truly make his impact in the fall.
Because the on-field part of that equation is still to come, of course, and if USC stumbles next season and shows the same lack of discipline or in-game adjustment issues that contributed to a 13-12 record over the last two years, the critics will circle right back to the decision to retain Helton (regardless of cost or extenuating factors) and be validated in that criticism.
That said, even in such a scenario, improving the infrastructure of the program was a long-term big-picture move that will benefit the operation moving forward regardless. And if Helton were to find himself on the hot seat again next fall, it's believed that USC would want to keep some of the new assistants in place even if a change is made at the top as they were viewed as significant additions -- not band-aids to fix a problem. That's a separate point -- whether it was Orlando (after coming close on a deal with Dave Aranda before he took the Baylor head coaching job), Williams, the other assistants or the new videographers, there was a strategy to the hires of identifying top targets who met specific criteria and then closing the deal.
And the understated positive of all these very public changes to the program is that the discussion about Helton's future is not permeating recruiting circles as it did the last couple years. Helton remains popular with recruits and their families (and he deserves a share of credit for closing the deal on those notable staff hires). Without his job status such a public talking point at the moment, it has been easier for USC to sell its vision to top prospects -- and the results show they're buying in.
All of that is to wind back around to the initial point ...
Just as the perception among recruits has changed dramatically in a short period of time, It would have been unfathomable in December with the fan base so apoplectic to have imagined a poll question like this netting such an overall positive response. But that just shows that fans are paying attention and taking notice -- even if remaining cautious in their optimism -- because there is indeed a lot of positive momentum right now for USC football again.
And that in itself is a notable accomplishment for Bohn, Sosna and Co., in just a handful of months.
