Helton is not ready to be in charge

Clay Helton is under scrutiny after a 1-5 start to his head coaching career – Photo by Kirby Lee

I like Clay Helton, I really do. I respect him. He is a man of faith and integrity. He truly cares, and players like him. However, being a great guy doesn’t mean you should be the head football coach at USC. Nice only gets you so far, and clearly not far enough for victory. That was evident Friday night, that was evident last week and it’s been evident every single time USC has taken the field against a Power-5 opponent with Clay Helton as the permanent head football coach.

I’m sure that with time Helton would be able to grow into the USC job. He has a sharp offensive mind and possesses excellent leadership skills, so the foundation is there. However, that is all it is right now, a foundation. As a head football coach, he is unfortunately anything but a finished product, and USC always needs a finished product at the helm.

This idea of growing into the job seems to be a trend with USC football coaches lately. I take Alabama football head coach Nick Saban to be a pretty accurate judge of coaching acumen. He has pegged former USC head coaches Lane Kiffin and Steve Sarkisian as top-flight assistants. At their current stage, that is the ceiling on their respective abilities. One day, that may change, especially under the tutelage of Saban. However, if they aren’t ready to be in charge now, why were they hired in the first place?

I have the same question regarding Helton. I wrote last year that there was no need to rush into hiring Helton. Waiting until after the bowl game to see how he performed in marquee matchups would have been helpful. After he was hired — primarily because the players love him and he says all the right things — I held out hope that he would find his way in the offseason. That hope died on Friday night.

Utah’s game-winning touchdown was not what finally extinguished my flicker of prayer, the fire actually went out after the game, during Helton’s press conference. When explaining his rationale for punting instead of going for it on fourth down inside the 40, he said he wanted to pin them back and “hope they can’t go 95 yards.”

They being the team that had just carved up USC on two straight touchdown drives. USC, a team which had its offense rolling with an All-American wide receiver in junior JuJu Smith-Schuster, a tailback averaging more than 12 yards a carry on the day in senior Justin Davis and a dynamic mobile quarterback in redshirt freshman Sam Darnold who has a rifle for an arm. Instead, Helton opted to trust his defense.

Clearly, at best that hope was wishful thinking, and at worst it was foolish and ill conceived. Still, head coaches should never hope. Head coaches know. Does Saban hope his team comes up with a stop? Does Urban Meyer? Does David Shaw? I have to imagine the answer is no. The only people who should be hoping are fans like myself who were praying for a miracle stop on Utah’s final drive.

The best coaches also play to win. If Helton was playing to win, he wouldn’t have punted inside the 40, nor would he have done the same the week before against Stanford. If he was playing to win, he wouldn’t have kept Justin Davis on the bench in the fourth quarter so he could spread out the touches among his stable of running backs.

The list could go on and on about the grievances from the first four games. Why are there so many blown plays on defense? Why was USC playing a soft zone on the final drive against Utah?

On offense, wunderkind redshirt freshman quarterback Sam Darnold covered up a lot of mistakes. Chief among them, keeping Davis off the field in the fourth quarter. However, untimely penalties and turnovers kept costing the team. With a thin margin of error, the cost isn’t just a 32-yard pass to Darreus Rogers for instance, it’s a loss.

If there is a bright side, it’s Darnold. He is phenomenal. For the first time since Mark Sanchez, USC has a quarterback with the velocity and fortitude to connect in between the hashes on slants and posts. He also demonstrated touch on feathery throws to redshirt junior wide receiver Steven Mitchell near the left boundary and down the middle of the field to the tight end, senior Taylor McNamara. Barring injury, I think Darnold has the chance to be the best quarterback at USC since Matt Leinart or Carson Palmer.

But what Darnold covered up was an offensive scheme that calls plays instead of running an actual offense. It seems that the Trojans are reading from a script all too often. If they run it three times, they have to pass the next time. Never mind the fact that those three runs are for big yards. It cost USC early against Stanford, and if Darnold didn’t make some big plays on third down against the Utes, it would have been the same story again.

At the end of the day, Clay Helton has forgotten more football X’s and O’s than I will ever know. I feel bad even writing this, as Helton seems like a truly tremendous individual. He just isn’t ready to run USC at the moment. His emphasis on moral victories is great for lessons and character building, but it doesn’t absolve him of being 1-3 this season and 1-5 since he took over.

My hope is that Darnold’s talent covers up a lot of errors over the next few weeks, as Helton learns more and more, just as Dabo Swinney did at Clemson. Great quarterbacks make up for a lot; Cam Newton won a title with Gene Chizik as coach. Darnold isn’t Newton just yet, but he is pretty special. I do hope Helton evolves, but as we learned Friday night, hope just isn’t enough sometimes.

Jake Davidson is a senior majoring in accounting. His column, “Davidson’s Direction,” runs Mondays.