The Point After: Swann alienates fanbase with Helton choice

For the overwhelming amount of USC fans, the present is truly all that matters. The football team is 5-7, recruits have begun to balk on commitments, the team is playing as bad as it has in this millennium, fans are refusing to show up to games — producing record low attendance numbers — and head coach Clay Helton is standing in the center of this inferno.

After a day which a plane flew overhead pleading to Athletic Director Lynn Swann to — “Please Fire Clay Helton,” the Trojans put on a valiant, if not predictable, losing effort in the Coliseum against archrival Notre Dame. This put the stamp on a bowl-less season for USC, its first as a sanction-less team since 2000. Moreover, this left Swann with a program-defining decision to make: Would the team continue on with Helton at the helm?

The message from the fanbase could not have possibly been clearer: USC fans want nothing to do with Helton.

Few teams in major professional or collegiate sports today have a fanbase as enraged about a head coach as USC football. There is a difference between wanting a change and being furious with a head coach, and USC fans are clearly the latter. Thus, Swann was thrust into the spotlight, forced to make a decision between backing his head coach or alienating the fanbase. And on Sunday he made his intentions very clear: Swann is going to live or die at the hands of Clay Helton.

In a move that displayed just how tone deaf and out-of-touch the USC Athletic Director is, Swann brushed over the fact that the 2018 Trojan football product was as bad as this program has been in two decades and instead looked to spotlight how Helton pulled out 21 wins over his first two full seasons. As impressive as that may be, Swann clearly failed to recognize many of the realities of the situation.

Swann failed to see the brilliance of former quarterback Sam Darnold and how Helton has an abysmal 6-9 record with a minus-36 point differential in games where the first-round pick did not start.

Swann failed to acknowledge how, since 2010, the year Helton arrived at USC as the quarterbacks coach, no program in the country has recruited as well as USC while still failing to play in a national championship.

Swann failed to understand that whatever significant financial loss may come from buying out Helton’s contract pales in comparison to what the program will lose in ticket sales, merchandise and (most importantly) donations from boosters.

Keeping Helton could turn out to be worse for business than it is for the football team, which is saying something, considering the financial impact the football program has on the University. In making this decision, Swann had not only almost no regard for the temperament of the fanbase today, but also for just how much this problem could snowball in the coming years.

In the past two years, almost every team in the Pac-12 South has made moves on the coaching staff that, at the very least, indicate progress. Aside from Utah sticking with a longtime successful coach in Kyle Whittingham, the rest of the division has fired unsuccessful coaches.

Results from their first seasons aside, Arizona’s Kevin Sumlin, Arizona State’s Herm Edwards and UCLA’s Chip Kelly all stand as hires that, if nothing else, will challenge USC’s previously perennial stranglehold on the division. Already, it is being threatened. This season, two of those three teams beat USC head-to-head, with the third matching the Trojans record-wise. It’s clear that the division, the conference and the nation are getting more competitive, yet Swann insists on standing his ground.

Throwing the full force of his name behind Helton can only be seen as an alienating move for the NFL Hall of Famer. Like Pat Haden and Mike Garrett before him, Swann endangers his legacy as a USC football star-turned-Athletic Director by turning a blind eye to the fanbase at such a massive juncture.

Additionally, Swann was not made available for media to take questions on Sunday after releasing the statement that Clay Helton would return in 2019. If the “us against everyone” mentality didn’t exist between USC Athletics and the fanbase before, it just might now.

At almost no point in the last 20 years has this team looked so uncompetitive, so directionless, so far beneath acceptable standards as it does today. If this is the kind of program USC fans are expected to see, they will surely find other things to do and teams to watch.

Los Angeles is a city filled with sporting and non-sporting distractions. Every team here knows what it is like to play in front of an empty stadium and now, thanks to the ignorance of Swann, it may be USC’s time.

Jimmy Goodman is a junior majoring in communication. His column, “The Point After,” ran every other Tuesday.