It Should Be Said: Darn Good Job, Ted

Joe Paterno can do just about anything now--win, lose or draw. Bo Schembechler, too. And Barry Switzer. And Tom Osborne. And Don James. They can coach to their hearts’ content. Their reputations are secure. They could go 0-11 and probably hang onto their jobs, not to forget their luncheon engagements and their morning-after television highlights shows.

People make up their minds about a man and are reluctant to re-think. He is a winner or a loser. He can coach or he can’t coach. He is a god who can do no wrong, a Bear Bryant or a Vince Lombardi, beyond the criticism of mortals, or he is a goof who should never have gotten the job in the first place, a Gerry Faust who belonged in high school ball, not the big-time.

Never mind that Faust knew a lot about football and represented everything that was fine and upstanding in a human being. Never mind that he never stomped along the sideline like a 6 year old, kicking yard-line markers, hurling his cap to the ground, yanking players’ jerseys and screaming at other human beings, ones in striped shirts, guys who want nothing more than to do a day’s work for a day’s pay and receive a proper measure of dignity and respect.

Ted Tollner has taken a considerable amount of crud in his time. He is the USC football coach, the man who went 6-6 last season and was treated as though he had just shut off the music at a party. Cat burglars would not deserve some of the comments made about Ted Tollner last season.

It was as though his 9-3 record and Rose Bowl triumph over favored Ohio State the season before had been discarded and forgotten. All of a sudden, cynics who did not know 1/100th as much about college football as Tollner came to the conclusion that he was not the man to ride the Trojan horse.

Tollner took it. He understood some of the furies that came with the job, and accepted the fact that there is no pleasing some people. If it was not his destiny to be a successful USC coach for a term as long as Paterno’s at Penn State or Schembechler’s at Michigan or some such coach, so be it.

Besides, it takes more than a spattering of criticism to rattle a man who has lived through what Tollner has lived through. Only 26 people survived the 1960 plane crash near Toledo, Ohio, that killed some of Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo’s finest young gentlemen and football players, and Tollner was one of them. One does not sweat won-and-lost records after something like that.

The vindication, if that is what it is, of Ted Tollner has begun with USC’s unexpected success in the first three weeks of the new football season. First, down went an opponent from the Big Ten, not a bad team, Illinois. Next, down went big, bad Baylor, powerhouse of the Southwest Conference, ranked No. 9 in the land.

Then, last weekend, Washington dropped around, with its No. 6 ranking and its ridiculously easy victories over two other opponents, and the Trojans took the Huskies by 10 points. You remember the Trojans--the team with only a dozen seniors and with the coach who couldn’t coach.

Not only does Tollner have them winning, but he also has them razzling and dazzling. If the coaching staff is not calling for a hook-and-ladder play from quarterback Rodney Peete to receiver Ken Henry, who hooks around a defensive back and goes high in the sky over his back to catch a lob, it is reversing the ball to flanker Randy Tanner and letting him throw the thing to Henry.

Not only is USC showing style, it is showing guts. When four turnovers tarnished the first half of the season opener, the Trojan defense permitted Illinois to turn them into no more than nine points. And after Baylor pushed the team from one end of Waco to another for more than 50 minutes, the Trojans kept coming and finally won the game on a field goal in a rainstorm.

In the wake of what they did against Washington last week, it is important to emphasize how well the Trojans are doing, if for no other reason than to give Tollner credit as quickly as he was once given grief. Fair is fair. If the guy is getting beat, 24-3, in the Aloha Bowl, OK, you do not have to vote for him for Coach of the Year. But if he puts a rebuilding team into the nation’s top 20, he deserves a pat on the back.

Pretty soon, people may be treating Tollner like their long lost friend, suggesting that the school hurry up and sign him to a long-term contract before Brigham Young or Texas A&M; or somebody makes off with him. There will be no “Tollner Must Go” banners visible at Saturday’s game with Oregon, unless they are brought by somebody from Oregon.

Success leads to expectation, of course, and Tollner is concerned about that. “I already hear people saying we’re going to be 5-0 real quick,” he said Tuesday, alluding to upcoming contests with underdogs Oregon and Washington State. “If we think like that, we’ll be 3-1 faster than you can blink an eye.”

Already, Trojan fans can taste it--the big game with Arizona State in a couple of weeks, the big season-closers with UCLA and Notre Dame, boy oh boy. Underdogs will be taken for granted. A loss to, say, Cal, a school that whipped the Trojans last season, will be unthinkable. Tollner’s team, young and unranked at the start of September, is supposed to be a monster by November.

Tollner must draw the line between enthusiasm and runaway ego. “I get excited, too, but I have reservations because we have so much youth,” he said. “We have to continue to grow, and you can’t predict how young people will respond. There are a lot of teams out there that can beat us.”

So, maybe so. Maybe the fast start will be a mirage, and USC’s high hopes will flicker and fade, and bandwagon-jumpers will be leaping off and throwing rocks again. Tollner will take what comes. If he cannot do with Peete and Henry and Tanner what USC coaches of the past have done with the likes of Pat Haden and Lynn Swann and O.J. Simpson, OK, that’s the way it goes.

It is funny, though, when civilians pretend to know more about football than a Ted Tollner does. They can sit there all day and all night wondering where he ever came up with that passing attack, when this is the man who was Jim McMahon’s offensive coordinator and quarterback coach at BYU, and twice the quarterback coach of the nation’s leading passer at San Diego State. Tollner knows more about passing than drunks do about passing out.

As for the upsets of Baylor and Washington this season, well, they should not have been so surprising. Five times since taking over as USC’s head coach, Tollner teams have played a team ranked in the top 10: Top-rated Washington in 1984, No. 5 Ohio State in the Rose Bowl, No. 8 UCLA a year ago, and the two opponents this season.

He has beaten all five.

Maybe the coaching regime of Ted Tollner at the University of Southern California will not turn out to be the stuff of which legends are made, but there comes a time when somebody ought to say that a man is doing a nice job. Ted Tollner is doing a nice job.