He Lacked the Name--and Luck of Irish

I hope USC wins that stupid bowl game, 55-0.

I hope Ted Tollner’s Trojans take Auburn apart, bit by bit, come New Year’s Day, then carry Tollner off the premises on their shoulders.

I hope they are so impressive that immediately after the game, Tollner gets offered the Auburn job.

I only wish he had been fired soon enough to have taken the Cal job, so he could come back to the Pac-10 next season and beat USC.

Ted Tollner is about to ride off into the sunset, and with any luck, he will rustle that white horse of USC’s before he hits the trail. Maybe sell it to some poor farmer with a heavy plow.

If he wins that Anita Bryant Bowl, or whatever it is, on Jan. 1, Tollner will have been fired from his coaching job with a season record of 8-4.

How come? Because some blasted Notre Dame kid kicked a last-second field goal to beat USC by a point, that’s how come. Had that not happened, the Trojans would be 8-3 right now, with a shot at 9-3.

At 9-3, Tollner probably could have gone to the president of the university and asked him to fire Mike McGee.

Instead, McGee, the USC athletic director, got together with his associates and decided that Mr. T had to go. This appeared to be a popular move with the USC student body, which in recent weeks has supported Tollner with the same loyal enthusiasm Brutus showed Caesar.

The consensus seems to be that Tollner will never be any better than a 7-4 coach, and that a 7-4 football record for the University of Southern California is tantamount to humiliation. A season like that makes Trojan alumni feel like wearing black armbands. It hurts as if they had just lost on a last-second field goal to Columbia.

The talk on campus now is that a “name” coach should be hired to attract impressionable high school superstars back to USC. If possible, someone with USC connections would be nice, if only to appease the alums. A former assistant coach, maybe. Or a former player.

Maybe O.J. Simpson is sick of doing rent-a-car commercials.

The university wouldn’t mind latching onto someone whose name is well known, coast to coast--or, at the very least, is someone on the order of George Raveling, the new USC basketball coach, who, although not as famous as Dean Smith or Bob Knight, was very familiar to coaches and players.

USC could, instead, look to someone familiar with its own coaches and players--defensive coordinator Artie Gigantino, for example. But that is unlikely. College and professional teams have short and selective memories. If the last coach was an “unknown” and didn’t work out, they go for a name. If the “name” coach didn’t work out, they go for someone who “deserves a chance.”

When Gerry Faust didn’t work out, Notre Dame went for Lou Holtz. If Holtz doesn’t work out, the next coach will be from a high school in French Lick.

That is why the names already being bandied about USC are names like Dick Vermeil and Joe Gibbs and--dare we say it--John McKay. The more famous, the better. Before long, someone will suggest Ara Parseghian, then Darrell Royal, then the late Bear Bryant, then Elvis.

Tollner, I hope, will find work quickly. I can see him coaching the quarterbacks on some pro team, or running a college program, cleanly and honorably, somewhere in the East. The Akron job is taken, but there are others around.

At least he will get paid by USC for the next couple of seasons, which is more than can be said for his assistants. All those head-hunters who wanted Tollner gone gave not a hoot for the assistants on his staff whose contracts are not guaranteed. When word came down Monday that Tollner had been fired, those guys had to scramble for telephones and try to find work.

They don’t have long-term, six-figure deals, these guys. John Cooper, the coach of Rose Bowl-bound Arizona State, proposed this week that the four highest teams in the national rankings hold a playoff, with each school getting $1 million apiece. Any other money earned would go toward a pension fund for assistant coaches, Cooper said, to protect them at times like these at USC.

I hope these gentlemen land on their feet. I also hope USC finds a good man to run its program.

And when he goes 5-6 next season, I hope the students and administrators contract Gene Bartow syndrome, a malady that befalls administrators when they don’t realize what a good coach they had until he is gone.

Because if USC’s new coach goes 10-1 next season, I’ll carry him off the field myself.