Sample Survey

And so the shrapnel swap meet that is USC-UCLA week officially opened Monday with this mortar round from USC President Steven Sample:

“Football is our flagship sport, no question, but it is by no means our most important sport.”

Wow, UCLA better duck, that was one heck of a . . .

Wait a minute.

What did he just say?

“Let me clarify that. . . . Football is our flagship sport, but that doesn’t mean it’s inherently more or less important than any other sport,” Sample repeated. “I will never say that one student-athlete is more important to this school than another.”

That doesn’t sound like “Fight on.”

That sounds like, “Chill out.”

Five days before his school wades into its annual battle for self-esteem, that strangely might be what everyone there needs to hear.

Sample phoned Monday, incidentally, not to offer a pep talk but to respond to a couple of questions about Mike Garrett:

1) Given the imminent firing of Coach Paul Hackett only three years after Garrett hired him, is the athletic director’s job in jeopardy?

2) How much have recent on-field struggles damaged the reputation of his football-dependent school?

At first blush, Sample’s answers were the verbal equivalent of Traveler being traded for Black Beauty:

1) Absolutely not.

2) Who says USC is football dependent?

During the course of a 20-minute conversation, however, Sample revealed himself as a football nut who hasn’t gone nuts, that rare Trojan whose helmet is not pulled so low as to block all perspective.

Unusual answers. But, perhaps, the right ones.

Is he happy with Hackett? He said he wouldn’t discuss the coach or the football program, so you do the math.

Sample acknowledges that he has rarely missed a game during the Hackett tenure. He visits the locker room at halftime and afterward on every occasion. He watches home games from the Coliseum stands. He is married to a woman whose uncle helped found the Chicago Bears.

He sees everything, hears everything, and we’re probably making a very short leap here to say that he likes very little of it.

If a university president sits in the back row of a failing chemistry class every week, chances are that the professor won’t be around long either.

His feelings on Garrett, however, are another story.

It is this story that the Trojan Nation will, we hope, find enlightening as it once again ends up entering this big game from the wrong side of the tracks.

Despite various assertions that UCLA has become this town’s dominant football program, Sample said he stands behind his athletic leader.

“Mike has done an excellent job overall,” he said. “I am very, very pleased with his performance.”

Garrett may have botched the most important hiring of his nearly eight-year career at USC--the only hiring that matters to most alumni--but Sample said it’s about far more than football.

“The student-athletes are not here to serve USC,” Sample said. “USC is here to serve the student-athletes. This is about balance in our athletic department. It’s about overall performance in every aspect.”

In other words, while the football team can’t beat Washington State at home, other USC teams have won six national titles in Garrett’s seven full years.

While the USC ran a punt play against Cal that featured approximately 25 Trojans on the field at once, the graduation rate for the team was recently 80%, the highest in school history.

While fans rock the Coliseum with boos, Garrett has led the largest facility-construction effort in the school’s history.

In the last two years, his efforts have led to the building of everything from a golf practice facility to a new weight room to, yes, a larger practice football field.

Not to mention, he has gone further than anyone in pushing an on-campus arena that could begin construction in a couple of years.

“He is the greatest athletic fund raiser in the history of our university by a large margin,” Sample said of Garrett. “Something that everybody has talked about for 50 years [an arena], he is making a reality.”

Just as he made women’s soccer, water polo and rowing on the intercollegiate level a reality.

“His strides in the important areas of gender equity have been tremendous,” Sample said.

Academics. Diversity. Balance.

Yeah, but, well, since taking over in January 1993, Garrett has overseen a football program that has gone to only three bowl games in seven years . . . after going to six bowl games in the previous seven.

He has hired celebrated coaches in everything from women’s volleyball to men’s golf.

Yeah, but, he hired Hackett despite previous failures at Pittsburgh, and the Trojans’ most important sport is now arguably its worst.

There have been no major NCAA infractions in any sport under Garrett.

But holding penalties everywhere.

The issue here is as simple as the Trojans’ playbook on third and one.

Do you look at an athletic program based on six top-10 finishes in seven years in the Sears Cup competition of all college sports?

Or do you look at a Wal-Mart football team?

Sample made it clear Monday that he looks at the former.

He essentially says he is backing Garrett because he is backing the notion that USC should strive to be smarter than a gridiron factory, more sophisticated then a boys club, better then those places where the president hopes to build a university that will make its football team proud.

Talking like this during the week of the biggest game for some of the biggest athletic boosters is an odd thing.

But for those who want their academic institutions to both inspire and reflect the values of their neighborhoods, it is a good thing.

This doesn’t mean Mike Garrett still doesn’t desperately need to make the right football coaching hire this time, if only because that is still the most important item in his job description.

It only means that his boss doesn’t believe the future of the university depends on it.

A pep talk indeed.

*

Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: bill.plaschke@latimes.com.

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