Taking Leave, but Not of Their Senses

This reminder from your reigning football champions: Although there’s no “i” in team, there is one in coaching.

Just when championships and Heisman trophies are becoming the norm again, the Norm -- as in, Chow -- is weighing an offer to take his offensive coordinating skills to the NFL’s Tennessee Titans.

This after Romeo Crennel and Charlie Weis, the New England Patriots’ defensive and offensive coordinators, respectively, decided to leave the ultimate team to run their own shows. Crennel is about to become the head coach of the Cleveland Browns, and Weis is returning to his alma mater to coach Notre Dame.

Yes, Crennel is willing to leave one of the great teams of the Super Bowl era to join a franchise that’s never been to the Super Bowl. Weis is heading to a program where expectations left reality standing in the blocks years ago.

And Chow is set to depart USC, where we just heard that the “family” was such a compelling reason for quarterback Matt Leinart to forgo the NFL’s millions and stay for his final year of eligibility.

(Do you like the way Tennessee Coach Jeff Fisher, loyal USC alumnus that he is, waited until after the national letter-of-intent signing day to make his play for Chow? That’s right, let the suckers think they’ll play for the offensive mastermind, then sweep him away. Oh, and if any of USC’s current players want to go somewhere else now that Chow’s gone, they’ll have to sit out a year. Really fair.)

I don’t blame Chow, Crennel or Weis. The life of an assistant coach is so demanding and unglamorous that they all deserve the few golden moments that come their way. Just remember that if these rules apply to them, they also apply to the players, who always get labeled selfish and inconsiderate the moment they even think of protecting their own interests.

It’s the great irony of football. If anything, football coaches have bigger egos than the players. All sporting attitudes filter down from the pros, and nowhere are the coaches more powerful and the players more expendable than in the NFL. In college, where players usually can stay a maximum of four years and leave early at their own risk, the coaches are even greater kings.

What was the common denominator in the Heismans won by Leinart and Carson Palmer? They ran an offense designed by Chow. It was an offense that scored at least 30 points in 28 of the last 33 games. And now he’s taking his playbook to Tennessee.

It would be easier to accept the departure of a man who has a chance to double his income and add a second comma to his salary, if only USC were a little more reluctant to see him go.

You get the sense that this is perfectly acceptable to Trojan Coach Pete Carroll, who won’t have to share more of the credit for the team’s success. There wasn’t a college coordinator in the country who got more love from the media than Chow.

Carroll, who could get excited just telling you what he had for breakfast, always sounded matter-of-fact when asked about Chow. He gave the man his due, he just didn’t sound overly happy to be talking about it.

Well, he won’t have to anymore. Now we’ll find out if people will be talking about USC quite as much in the years to come.

Of course, there were also the annual questions of whether Chow would move on to a college head-coaching job. He made no secret that he wanted a program of his own. But he had to wonder whether he’d ever get a chance. If it couldn’t happen at Utah, where he’s an alum, or at Stanford, whose cerebral athletes are the type Chow values, where would it?

I’m not sure Chow would have been a great head coach, wherever he went. His players at USC always seemed to respect him, but weren’t inspired by him. They played for Carroll. I can’t imagine Chow taking a plunge off the high dive, the way Carroll did in a motivational ploy last summer.

But Chow could have had a rah-rah assistant to help recruit and motivate players. The smart coaches delegate.

Carroll had a perfect staff in place, with extensions of himself on each side of the ball. Chow represented the strategic brilliance that Carroll -- who made a name for himself as an NFL defensive coordinator -- brought to his area of expertise. Assistant head coach Ed Orgeron, who left to take the head coaching job at Mississippi after USC won the Orange Bowl, represented Carroll’s passionate side.

The players loved Orgeron’s controlled rage. The lasting image I’ll have of Orgeron is his gathering of his backup defensive linemen on the sidelines at Pro Player Stadium in the final minutes of USC’s thrashing of Oklahoma. He screamed and went over strategies with them as if the national championship depended on the next series.

We’ll see how Carroll fares without these two key components. Remember, the ol’ ball coach, Steve Spurrier, never won a national championship at Florida until Bob Stoops came aboard as his defensive coordinator. He never won one after Stoops left to take the head coaching job at Oklahoma.

We’ll see just how much of a genius New England’s Bill Belichick is now that his top two aides are gone. One of the reasons he is a greater success with the Patriots than he was with the Cleveland Browns is that he has learned to farm out the responsibilities. He couldn’t have found two more worthy assistants than Crennel and Weis. The Patriots managed to keep their core group of players intact in this free agency era, but now they’re losing their coaching core.

We’ll see which has the bigger effect. We’ve already seen who has the greater personal motivations.

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J.A. Adande can be reached at j.a.adande@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Adande, go to latimes.com/adande.