It really is remarkable that multiple great USC coaches first worked at Oregon before coming to Los Angeles.
John McKay was an Oregon assistant in the 1950s before USC hired him as an assistant before the 1959 season. McKay was then promoted to head coach in 1960. The rest, as they say, is history. McKay became USC’s greatest head football coach of all time.
McKay added an assistant coach to his USC staff in the 1970s. His name was John Robinson, a man who had previously been an assistant coach at Oregon under then-head coach Jerry Frei.
When John Robinson was an Oregon assistant, he bonded with one of his football players in Eugene, a man named Norv Turner. In 1975, Turner was a graduate assistant at Oregon, but when Robinson became USC head coach before the 1976 season, he reached out to Turner and put him on the Trojans’ head coaching staff.
Turner became a valuable assistant for Robinson in the late 1970s, as USC continued its dynastic run.
USC repeatedly found great coaches who worked at Oregon first.
In this series on Pac-12 football memories, we talked to Ducks Wire analyst Don Smalley about these and other USC-Oregon connections from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s:
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