Tag: John McKay

USC rule of three: A trio of great Trojan coaches pounced at the same time

#USC has its own rule of three: John McKay, John Robinson, and Pete Carroll are all united in Trojan lore.

The history of USC football is rich. It has covered more than a full century since 1922, when Gus Henderson led the Trojans onto the gridiron. We have been remembering USC’s great unbeaten teams over the decades, from the earlier eras of the program to modern times.

There are many remarkable facts to mention about the storied history of USC football. One of the more eye-opening facts about this program is that three of its great coaches all won national championships in their third season in the Associated Press Poll era, which began in 1936.

You couldn’t make up something like this if you tried.

John McKay became USC head coach before the 1960 season. He won the national championship in 1962, his third season at the helm.

John Robinson took over as USC head coach from McKay in the 1976 season. He won the national title in 1978, his third season as head man.

Pete Carroll took over as USC head coach before the 2001 college football season. He won the Associated Press national championship in 2003, his third season.

Three great coaches at USC won their first national championship at the school in their third season. Good things come in threes? It’s definitely true at USC.

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Pac-12 football history: USC repeatedly took great coaches from Oregon

We talked to @Donald_Smalley of @Ducks_Wire about one fascinating historical connection between Oregon and USC.

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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Bob Devaney was John McKay’s contemporary and a fellow CFB icon

When John McKay restored #USC in the 1960s, Bob Devaney built a Heartland empire in Lincoln with the #Huskers. #B1G

If you asked anyone under 50 years old to name the best coach in Nebraska football history, you would regularly get one answer more than others: Tom Osborne. That answer would be correct, if only because Osborne presided over a top-10 program for 25 years, from 1973 through 1997, winning three national championships and a bunch of Orange Bowls.

Osborne’s predecessor was really good, but this predecessor coached for only 11 seasons. He did win multiple national championships, but if one coach produces elite, national championship-level quality for 11 years and another guy does pretty much the same thing over 25 years, it’s hard to pick the 11-year coach over the 25-year coach.

Osborne is the best head coach Nebraska has ever had.

However, he’s not the most important figure in Nebraska football (and sports) history.

It’s that predecessor we have referred to.

His name: Bob Devaney.

Nebraska had some really good teams in pre-World War I times, and coaching legend Dana X. Bible spent almost a decade at the school in the first half of the 1930s, when Howard Jones was building USC into a national football power. Yet, when Bob Devaney came from Wyoming to take over Nebraska in 1962 as head coach, the Huskers were a nobody in college football. In the 21 seasons preceding his arrival — from 1941 through 1961 — Nebraska had a losing season 17 times. The program wasn’t average; it was bad and completely irrelevant.

Devaney won nine games in his first season in 1962. By the time he stepped down as head coach following the 1972 season, in order to become full-time athletic director at Nebraska, he had produced nine seasons with nine or more wins. He won two national championships. He coached a Heisman Trophy winner, Johnny Rodgers, in 1972. He cultivated Osborne as an assistant and promoted him to head coach when he moved into the AD chair.

There’s no Tom Osborne without Bob Devaney. There’s no Nebraska football golden age without Bob Devaney, who made Nebraska a national juggernaut after a decade of disappointment in the 1950s, a clear parallel with John McKay at USC.

McKay watched USC slide into irrelevance in the 1950s while he was an assistant coach at Oregon. McKay seized an opportunity in 1960 and never looked back, launching USC’s greatest dynastic period and making himself the greatest football coach the Trojans have ever had.

Though Devaney is second to Osborne on the list of all-time Nebraska head coaches, he is number one on the list of the most important people in the history of Nebraska sports. He is the restorative 1960s figure John McKay proved to be for USC, a fellow icon and traveler in an era when the Huskers and Trojans both rose to the mountaintop in college football.

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USC-Ohio State 1960 game: John McKay vs Woody Hayes for the first time

USC didn’t beat Woody Hayes in 1960, but John McKay stared down Woody Hayes. Bigger moments would come in the 1970s.

In 1960, USC football was searching for a return to a winning tradition. The Trojans were in transition, having endured three rough seasons under head coach Don Clark (although the 1959 significantly improved from the 1957 and 1958 teams). USC really hadn’t been an elite program since the mid-1940s, when it made four Rose Bowls in five seasons under then-coach Jeff Cravath.

USC needed someone to restore the magic.

It didn’t happen all at once in 1960, and it didn’t happen against Woody Hayes and Ohio State. USC got shut out on the road, 20-0, in October of 1960. The Trojans went 4-6 that season while Ohio State finished 7-2.

However, 1960 gave USC — and college football — a coach who would change everything in the course of time.

John McKay, a former Oregon assistant, made his way to Los Angeles to begin what would become a historic 16-year run as USC head coach. He took his lumps in 1960 and 1961, including in this first meeting with Woody Hayes at Ohio State. He learned from those lumps. USC went unbeaten in 1962 and won the national championship. Before McKay was done, he would win four national titles at USC and then hand off the program — in great shape — to another former Oregon assistant, John Robinson, who kept the winning tradition going for several more years.

In our all-time USC series published last year, we named McKay the greatest coach in USC football history. Better than Pete Carroll. Better than John Robinson. He has to be.

It all started in 1960.

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USC joining Penn State in Big Ten raises huge historical questions

One such historical question is this: What if Penn State joined the #B1G in 1973, not 1993? Life would have been very different.

USC and Penn State are two proud college football programs which expect to compete for championships. They have both achieved a lot on the gridiron. USC has thrived for a much longer period of time, but over the past 45 years, Penn State has had more success.

These programs have forged so many achievements that one would think they have intersected a lot. However, they haven’t. They met in the 1982 Fiesta Bowl, a moderately meaningful bowl at the time but not a game with national championship implications. The 2009 and 2017 Rose Bowls similarly did not affect the national title picture for either team. These teams should have a bigger, more important shared history, but they don’t.

Ask yourself this question: What if Penn State had moved to the Big Ten Conference in 1973, not 1993 (when it actually did join the Big Ten)?

How different would the history of college football have become?

John McKay of USC left the Trojans after the 1975 season to pursue an NFL career with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Paterno remained at Penn State for over 40 years as head coach. If Penn State had joined the Big Ten two decades earlier, Paterno and McKay might have met in a Rose Bowl. It’s something which never happened, all while Paterno became one of the few coaches in college football history to make the Sugar, Cotton, Orange, and Fiesta Bowls (due to Penn State having independent status at the time).

One can come up with more follow-up questions to the hypothetical of Penn State joining the Big Ten in the early 1970s. One such follow-up: Would Penn State have busted up the monopoly Ohio State and Michigan had on Rose Bowl berths in the Big Ten at the time? From the 1968 season (1969 Rose Bowl) through the 1980 season (1981 Rose Bowl), the Buckeyes and Wolverines were the only Big Ten teams to make the Rose Bowl. Penn State could have dramatically reshaped that story if it ever had a chance to compete in the Big Ten back then.

USC and Penn State never playing in the Rose Bowl during the McKay-John Robinson era at Heritage Hall is one of the great “missed connections” in college football history.

At least next year, USC and Penn State will be able to play regularly, something they weren’t able to do in past decades. A new era of this underplayed series can begin.

Get more Penn State news, analysis and opinions at Nittany Lions Wire.

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USC-Notre Dame classic photos from John McKay-Ara Parseghian glory days

.@IrishWireND would agree: The 1964-1974 11-Year War between John McKay and Ara Parseghian needs an @ESPN @30for30 documentary. #USC

When people talk about “the good old days,” such a longing for nostalgia can cloud the memory. When a person is quick to say how much better things were back then, it can simply be a longing for the innocence of childhood, or a return to a time when things were simpler. That can be a naive instinct. It might not be informed by reality or a mature understanding of a situation.

Human beings long to go back to what is comfortable, but that doesn’t necessarily mean things were actually better in the past. Emotions can — and do — overpower reason and rationality.

Yet, some times, things really and truly were better back in the day.

Consider the USC-Notre Dame football rivalry.

From 1964 through 1974, John McKay of the Trojans and Ara Parseghian of the Irish gave USC-Notre Dame 11 special games and a battle of iconic coaches who regularly competed for national titles.

Notre Dame won the national title in 1966 under Parseghian. USC won it all in 1967 under McKay.

USC won the national title in 1972. Notre Dame came back and won the national championship in 1973. USC won it in 1974.

Even after McKay and Parseghian left, the schools won natties in consecutive seasons yet again: Notre Dame in 1977 under Dan Devine, USC in 1978 under John Robinson.

The 1960s and 1970s were glory years for USC and Notre Dame. Relive their rivalry when it was at its height in these amazing photos:

Notre Dame-USC Rivalry: Biggest Villains

Who is your answer and why?

Credit: Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports

Over the last week or so I’ve exchanged several emails, messages, and had multiple conversations with Matt Zemek of Trojans Wire about not just Notre Dame and USC for 2021, but the historic side of the rivalry as well.  From now until Saturday night’s kickoff I’ll share our thoughts on some questions we came up with for each other in regards to the rivalry.

Related: Notre Dame-USC: fun facts about epic rivalry

Who is the biggest villain on the other side of the rivalry and why?

Next: I answered from a Notre Dame perspective while Matt did so from the USC side of things…

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Brian Kelly makes cringeworthy statement in postgame interview

Uh, Brian?

When your team almost blows a game it should have won easily, you sometimes say things you don’t mean. When Notre Dame needed overtime to beat Florida State after blowing an 18-point fourth-quarter lead Sunday, you never would have guessed the Irish had won based on Brian Kelly’s words. When being interviewed by Katie George on ABC immediately after the game, Kelly uttered some words that would have spelled disaster for him in any other context:

If this was Kelly’s attempt at being clever, it certainly wasn’t the best one. It wasn’t easy for anyone to watch Irish nearly give that game away, and some fans might have choice words for certain players, if not the whole team. Even if Kelly was saying it tongue-in-cheek in reference to former USC and Tampa Bay Buccaneers coach John McKay, which he claimed was the case, the environment we live in might not let him off very easily, or it might just open him up to ridicule. Either way, it would be a little surprising if social media decided to forget this.