For USC, Stoops Looks Like One That Got Away

A weekend recap reveals Oklahoma won its 18th consecutive game and USC did not, raising again the prickly subject of how things might have been different had Trojan Athletic Director Mike Garrett, in late 1997, picked up the phone and called Bob Stoops instead of Paul Hackett.

This is hindsight, for sure, but not revisionist history.

You watch the steely-eyed Stoops coach Oklahoma these days and easily conceive of him resurrecting once-proud USC instead of once-proud Oklahoma.

It wasn’t as though Oklahoma plucked Stoops from obscurity. Even the sportswriters knew in 1997 that Stoops, then Florida’s defensive coordinator, would one day blow whistles for his own program.

No one knew how soon, or that soon would mean Sooner.

The season after USC hailed Hackett, Oklahoma landed Stoops, presumably set to succeed Hayden Fry at Iowa, Stoops’ alma mater, before the Hawkeyes botched negotiations.

Oklahoma moved in, using the savvy political skills of Oklahoma President David Boren, the former U.S. Senator and governor, who knew a rising-star candidate when he met one.

Then again, Stoops would not have been available had he been locked up at USC, which put its political chips on an erudite football intellectual. Hackett seemed perfectly happy drawing up plays for the Kansas City Chiefs before USC so rudely interrupted.

Who can know what Stoops would have said had Garrett called, but one of the possible answers was “yes.”

Stoops might have done at USC what he has done at Oklahoma, coming off its worst four-year football stretch when Stoops arrived in Norman.

No one could have predicted Stoops would be this good this fast. Yet, beneath his choirboy face churned a hard-boiled opportunist, a man who absorbed situational football ethics from two of the games’s most heartless practitioners --Kansas State Coach Bill Snyder and Florida’s Steve Spurrier.

Stoops studied defense under Snyder during the reconstruction of Kansas State, once the worst Division I-A program in history. A young coach can learn a lot from a man like Snyder, who literally cordoned off his program by trimming the practice field fence with barbed wire.

When Stoops refused to disclose the injury to quarterback Nate Hybl after Saturday’s 14-3 win over Texas, well, that was the Bill Snyder in him talking.

From Spurrier, Stoops took the cat-and-mouse genius and the techniques of mischief and disinformation. To keep a piece of Steve Spurrier Sr. by his side, Stoops even hired Steve Spurrier Jr. to coach the Sooner receivers.

It is a combination of guile, guts and energy Stoops has unleashed on Oklahoma, which won a national title last year and is headed in that direction again this year.

You look at USC’s first-year Coach Pete Carroll, now 1-4, and say how unlucky it is that he has lost four games by a total of 14 points.

Yet, we saw in Saturday’s battle of Texas-Oklahoma coaches, Mack Brown vs. Stoops, that great coaches tend to win close games and good ones don’t.

During Oklahoma’s 18-game winning streak, the Sooners have won games decided by one, three, four, five and 11 points (twice).

We don’t know where USC is headed yet, it’s still too soon to tell, but we can say this after taking in an afternoon of Oklahoma: the Sooners are going to get better before they get worse. Oklahoma has only 12 seniors on its roster. The stars of Saturday’s victory were two redshirt freshmen and three sophomores.

Jason White, the sophomore backup quarterback who rescued the Sooners against Texas, is from Tuttle, Okla.

While coaching at Miami, Butch Davis tried unsuccessfully to lure White to Coral Gables, , calling the kid the best prospect to emerge from Oklahoma since Troy Aikman.

Mark Mangino, Oklahoma’s offensive coordinator, can’t believe the dividend reward the Sooners are getting playing all these kids.

“We went through growing pains in the biggest game of the year,” he said after the Texas win.

USC’s growing pains have, thus far, come tagged with a different cost: defeat.

Rose Bowl Tracking Poll

* In the game this week: Oklahoma versus Oregon. Oh, what fun. This would be college football’s equivalent of Baltimore vs. St. Louis in the Super Bowl.

Savor the strategies of Oregon quarterback Joey Harrington trying to pick holes in the nation’s quickest defense. Without quarterback Josh Heupel, Oklahoma’s offense isn’t as good as last season, but the defense might be better.

Oregon, after playing patty-cake with the final score in four less-than-compelling victories, is coming off a dam-break, 63-28 dismantling of Arizona, the only school in the Pacifc 10 Conference that has even bothered trying to play defense in the last decade.

To Duck doubters, Saturday’s win may have been a jumping-off point toward the greatness many had predicted.

* Still has a float in the parade: UCLA, Florida, Miami, Nebraska, Virginia Tech, Washington, South Carolina.

Comments: The loser of Washington at UCLA next week can take a bowl championship series seat. UCLA has the edge coming off an open date knowing Washington quarterback Cody Pickett is out with a separated shoulder. Who said USC isn’t good for something? Florida is looking scary-good, but the back end of the schedule (South Carolina, Tennessee, Florida State, SEC title game) still gives us pause. Miami is not winning over any of the BCS computers, but that should improve with next week’s visit to Florida State. We still think Virginia Tech is in the top 10 on a sponsor’s exemption, but we’ll grant the defense looks wicked.

* Worst performance by a team with an open date: Fresno State. The 5-0 Bulldogs took the weekend off, and lost ground in the BCS?

So much for front-loading with strength of schedule points. Fresno State took on all nonconference comers to improve its BCS stock, but big early-season wins against Wisconsin and Oregon State have become a wash. Wisconsin dropped to 3-3 after getting clobbered by Indiana at Madison, 63-32, while preseason No. 11 Oregon State fell (timber!) to 1-3 after a loss at Washington State.

* Please pick up a Rose Bowl parting gift: Northwestern, Tennessee, Texas.