He Was Taken for Granted

The story of Grant Mattos is too good to clutter with facts. Better to stick with the fairy tale version.

Once upon a time last spring, USC offensive coordinator Norm Chow traveled to the San Francisco Bay Area to look at a junior college quarterback. Chow watched him throw a few balls and wasn’t interested, but he happened to notice the guy on the other end of those passes.

Actually, the receiver didn’t have to make a single catch.

“The minute he got out of the car,” Chow says, “you could tell.”

Six-foot-two and broad-shouldered, he looked like the type who could bull through linebackers and bowl over safeties. The kind you could throw to on third and seven. Yet he was undiscovered, overlooked, not a single school interested in him.

Chow called Coach Pete Carroll, who flew north. The next thing you know, Mattos was a Trojan.

“What a great story,” Carroll says.

In his first big-time game, last week against San Jose State, Mattos led the team with 75 yards in five receptions, a few tough slants and curls among them, and everyone lived happily ever after.

In reality, though, he wasn’t quite a diamond in the rough, not quite an overnight success.

“A lot of years in the making,” he says. “Years of hard work and people telling you good things will happen.”

A schoolboy star at St. Francis High in Mountain View, Calif., his shot at a scholarship evaporated when a hip injury robbed him of a senior season. Rather than try his luck as a walk-on and risk getting lost in the shuffle, he enrolled at nearby Foothill Junior College, where Coach Marshall Sperbeck recognized what kind of player he had.

“Everything you look for,” Sperbeck says. “Hard worker, great size, catches the ball, understands the game.”

Mattos caught 46 passes his freshman season and the Foothill Owls were nationally ranked. His numbers got even better last season-76 receptions and 14 touchdowns-and he was named player of the year in a conference that produced national champion City College of San Francisco. Surely the scholarship offers would roll in.

All last spring, coaches came through Foothill to watch workouts. Arkansas took the quarterback, the one USC didn’t want. Nevada took the tight end. Boise State took a defensive lineman.

No one took Mattos.

“I was constantly on the phone trying to convince people that this was a heck of a player,” Sperbeck says. “We were calling Division II schools. We sent out videotape.”

They always wanted someone faster or flashier, someone different. Recruiters invariably asked: Well, who else is looking at him? When Sperbeck said no one, they lost interest.

“You have all these expectations,” Mattos says. “Nothing really turned out the way I thought it would.”

Then Chow showed up. He had come for a quarterback but, having already spotted Mattos, said USC might need a receiver. Sperbeck launched into his sales pitch, talking fast because he figured any second Chow might tell him to shut up.

He was preaching to the choir. For almost three decades, Chow had made stars out of receivers who were slow on 40-yard dash times but good at running precise routes and making tough catches. That’s the kind of receiver he saw when Mattos worked out. They spoke for a few minutes and Chow told him: “We’ll keep in touch.”

A nervous week passed. Mattos planned to walk on at California, figuring he might win a spot with the Bears. Then Carroll arrived.

Mattos put on another impressive workout and spent only a few minutes chatting before Carroll offered him a scholarship on the spot. How long did it take him to accept?

Mattos smiles. “Two seconds.”

Within weeks, he was visiting USC. As a possession receiver, he knew it was vital to form a relationship with his new quarterback, the guy who would trust him to make clutch catches. But he did not fully appreciate the shoes he had to fill until he met Carson Palmer.

“Carson told me about his friend,” Mattos recalls.

Palmer’s go-to guy last season was Matt Nickels, not only a sure-handed receiver but also a childhood pal. With Nickels graduated, Palmer and Mattos struck up a friendship.

“I ended up staying at his house over the summer,” Mattos says. “He’s a real cool guy. Easy to get along with.”

They spent the weeks before training camp working on passing drills. When it came time to issue jerseys, coaches gave Mattos several to choose from and he selected No. 87. Later, Palmer told him that had been Nickels’ jersey.

“A nice coincidence,” Mattos says.

USC coaches soon confirmed they too had made the right choice. At 220 pounds, Mattos was a fitting complement to smaller, faster receivers such as Kareem Kelly and Keary Colbert.

“Great size and hands,” said Troy Polamalu, the strong safety, who predicted from the first day that Mattos would be the surprise of camp.

The proof came on the offense’s third play against San Jose State, Mattos catching a 21-yard pass from Palmer. Three times on third and long, he made a first down. One of those receptions kept alive a touchdown drive.

“Almost every catch he made was a big catch,” Carroll says. “The ball just kind of stuck to him.”

With Kansas State coming into the Coliseum on Saturday, Wildcat Coach Bill Snyder also noticed.

“I was impressed with the new guy,” Snyder says. “I was impressed with the way he flew around and dove around.”

So Mattos has been the rage this week on television and in the newspapers. Yet, for all his newfound success, he appears cool. Not that he expected to do so well so soon, but he always pictured himself playing in the big time. All it took was patience. A lot of patience.

How does the fairy tale end? The past has taught him not to look far ahead. “One week at a time, one practice at a time,” he says.