He Can’t Win : Larry Smith Is in a Tough Spot: USC Is Expected to to Beat Fresno State, but if It Doesn’t . . .

Larry Smith finds himself in a no-win situation.

Even if his heavily favored team defeats Fresno State on Tuesday night in the Freedom Bowl at Anaheim Stadium, the USC football coach will still be 0-6 against Notre Dame.

He will still be 1-2-1 against UCLA during the last four years.

He will still have a losing record in bowl games.

And he will still be under attack from those who want him out.

If USC loses, of course, the heat on Smith will only intensify.

But he won’t quit.

“I would never do that,” he said. “I don’t teach my players to do that, and I’m not going to do that.

“People underestimate the resiliency of coaches. We know what we’re getting into when we get into it. Sometimes, it’s tougher than others. You just have to be resilient and fight through it.

“The guy that you’ve got to satisfy is the guy you’re looking at in the mirror. If you can’t satisfy him, if you get to that point where you’re disgusted with him and he says to you, ‘I can’t take it anymore,’ sure, it’s time to go.

“But I guarantee that guy in the mirror’s not telling me that.”

In this case, though, the man in the mirror won’t have the final say.

Smith will soon have a new boss.

Mike McGee, who hired him away from Arizona before the 1987 season and was one of his most ardent supporters, signing him to a contract extension before the 1991 season,

announced last month that he is leaving his job as athletic director at USC to take the same position at South Carolina.

Smith’s future is uncertain, although it is believed that he is signed through at least two more seasons. If he is losing sleep, however, he is not letting on.

“I can’t worry about what other people are thinking or saying, and I’m not going to,” he said. “I’m the head football coach at USC and working to fulfill my responsibilities and duties as best I can.

“I’m sorry to see Mike McGee go. He was a very loyal athletic director for me. He hired me, he supported me, and we had some great times together, some great championships. But he moves into a new era, and so do I.”

It starts with the Freedom Bowl game against Fresno State, an opponent that many Trojan supporters believe is not worthy of a program of USC’s stature.

“I don’t have any control over that, so why worry about it?” Smith said. “I just take care of my football team, rather than sit and talk about things I have no control over. They’re going to perceive what they’re going to perceive.”

Is it a misperception?

“I think all of college football right now is a misperception, from the standpoint that people are still ingrained in names and logos from the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s,” Smith said. “In college football, scholarship limits have come down and everything is equal.

“On any given day, you can take team No. 1 and play team No. 80 and, if things happen right, team No. 80 can beat team No. 1.

“We keep saying it. Coaches say it and players say it, but fans don’t believe it. They just kick back to what they’ve always known and the names they recognize. (They say,) ‘Geez, this team won a national championship in 1942, so they should be a powerhouse (now).’ That is not the way things work anymore.”

At USC, though, the alumni expect better than the Freedom Bowl, especially when the Trojans are poised to make a run for the Rose Bowl heading into the final month of the season.

USC, rebounding from a 3-8 season in 1991, was 5-1-1 before losing three of four games in November to finish the regular season with a 6-4-1 record.

Included were consecutive losses to UCLA and Notre Dame in the final two weeks, and Smith hasn’t heard the end of it.

“Any time at USC, when you don’t win the conference championship, you’re going to come under attack,” he said. “But that’s part of coaching. It’s there, so what do I do about it? The best thing I can do is to put my nose to the grindstone and coach the football team and prepare it for the Freedom Bowl.”

But is he weary of the constant criticism from outsiders?

“It’s part of coaching,” he said.

With McGee leaving and his detractors growing louder, would Smith be more inclined now to entertain offers from other schools?

“Coaching is a business,” Smith said. “You always have to look at any offer that comes along and see how it compares to your present situation.

“But I’ve made a commitment to USC and have some goals to fill. We’re on a move back up from a year ago, and I feel that my job is going to start getting fun again.”

Smith said that the response from recruits has been “excellent” and that his players are excited about playing in the Freedom Bowl, even if longtime Trojan supporters are not.

“It’s a bowl game,” Smith said. “These kids are winners. They want to go out a winner this season. I haven’t had any trouble. They’ve worked as hard as they did before UCLA or Notre Dame. We’ve had good preparation.”

Still, he acknowledges that USC, obligated to the Freedom Bowl by a contract that sends the Pac-10’s third-place team to Anaheim, is in a no-win situation.

“When you’re expected to win, if you win, they say (so what),” Smith said. “We’re looking at it from a seasonal standpoint. You win the last game of the season, that gives you pretty good momentum. I’ve tried to point out to our players: 7-4-1 sounds like a pretty good season.”

For some, of course, it won’t be good enough, but Smith said the Trojans have come a long way from last season, when they had their worst record in 35 years.

Asked if the talent of his team might have been overestimated, he said: “I think it’s always overestimated. The expectations are so high. We have some very good talent, but the league was very good this year, too.

“I feel good about it, as far as us playing up to our talent level. We had a young quarterback (sophomore Rob Johnson), and we were very unsettled in the offensive line (because of injuries). That affected our offense quite seriously.

“Our defense was better (than last season’s), but it gave up some big plays near the end of the season that hurt us. In the secondary, we improved at safety, but probably not at corner. In our recruiting, we’ve got to find corners who can come in and play right away.”

The Trojans’ 1-3 finish was “unsettling,” Smith said.

“That was one of the things we worked hard at--to finish strong,” he said. “We really had a tough go at the start of the season. I thought we picked up good steam in the middle, but we lost three out of the last four, and that’s certainly not the way we wanted to end the season. To me, winning three out of four would have been more like it.”

What happened?

“I think we played some of the best teams (at the end),” said Smith, whose team lost to Stanford and defeated Arizona before losing to UCLA and Notre Dame. “Look at who we played. I think that was part of it right there.

“I think the fact that we had pressure on us all season really wore on us at the end. We were the only team in the country that didn’t have any weeks where we could let up a little bit and still win.

“We had to play every quarter of every game for 11 games. There just comes a point where you’re going to have a little dip.”

What happens next, of course, is that the heat is applied.

It used to bother Smith a lot more than it does now, he said, “but as it went on, I soon learned it’s going to be there no matter what. You can win a game and get criticism, or you can lose a game and get praise. It’s stupid, but that’s the way it is.”