Old-School Move by a Big Man on Campus

We forget, don’t we?

We bloat them with pads and put them on television and forget they’re just kids.

We ponder point spreads and dissect scouting reports and forget it’s just fun.

We forget, until a guy like Matt Leinart shows up in an untucked shirt, baggy jeans and a decision that makes us remember.

The USC quarterback chose to walk away from cool NFL millions and back into a warm Trojan embrace Friday, shocking every working stiff in the room with reasoning only a college jock could understand.

Because he’s having a blast. Because he likes his buds. Because he has the rest of his life to punch a clock.

Nothing to prove, everything to lose, taking one of the biggest monetary risks in sports history, Leinart chose to remain at USC for a fifth year and final season not because of classes, or Heismans, or roses.

He’s staying because he feels he’s just not ready to leave home.

Which means he probably isn’t.

Let’s see Mel Kiper argue with that.

“It came down to just being here again,” Leinart said as happy fans pounded the glass outside the Heritage Hall meeting room. “Being with my teammates. The whole SC family. Something special is going on that I just wasn’t ready to give up.”

We see athletes suing to join the NFL before they are old enough to drink, athletes leaping to the NBA before fifth-period history, athletes looking at college not as a future but a failure.

And now we have a top-three draft pick wanting to spend an extra year there?

Something special, indeed.

Here is a kid who looks as if he doesn’t comb his hair blowing off the slickest league in sports.

“I had a good idea where I’d end up,” Leinart said. “But my decision was more important than that.”

Here is a kid who makes $950 a month in scholarship money blowing off a chance for at least a guaranteed $10-million signing bonus.

“Money is not important to me,” he said.

Here is a kid who has just done something I wouldn’t do, something even few die-hard Trojan followers would do: Give up lifetime security to spend four more months with a team for which he’s already won two championships.

Couldn’t he “Fight On” from his summer home on the Mediterranean? With his signing bonus, couldn’t he have hired a band to play “Conquest” on his front lawn every night for the rest of his life?

Yet, again, we forget.

What were we like when we were 21?

Money was incidental, friendships were forever, our bodies were immortal and our future was tonight.

“I don’t play scared, I play to win ... I could be hurt tomorrow,” Leinart said.

After barely one full season on the national stage -- remember you folks who wanted John David Booty to be quarterback in the middle of last season? -- it is a risk Leinart is clearly willing to take.

He is obviously not ready to leave Pete Carroll, whom Leinart hugs more than anybody on the sidelines, and who was nearly crying when they hugged again Friday.

Convincing an unbeaten national championship Heisman Trophy winner in his fourth year to spend one more season playing for free ...

Yep, I’d say Carroll just completed the recruiting job of a lifetime.

“This is a wonderful statement about college football,” Carroll said. “For those guys, really, this is the time of their lives.”

Leinart also is obviously not ready to leave the Norm Chow offense in which he has become so comfortable, even if the added experience might move him only incrementally in the draft.

“I think my arm is strong enough to play in the NFL ... one more year is only going to help me,” he said.

And he said he wasn’t ready to leave his teammates, as he gathered three of them in a meeting room and gave them his decision before announcing it publicly.

Said receiver Dwyane Jarrett: “We were shaken.”

Said running back LenDale White: “I was going to ask him for a Range Rover.”

When all the eyebrows finally lowered Friday, three equally jolting notions became clear:

* The Trojans will be overwhelming favorites to become college football’s first three-peat national champions.

* Leinart could become one of the greatest quarterbacks in college football history.

* If they lose a game or Leinart struggles, the second-guessing will be heard from here to the Miami Dolphins.

Friday, it was about a testament.

Beginning today, it will be about a target, squarely on the backs of this unbeatable team and hard-to-believe quarterback.

And USC thought keeping its top ranking and locker-room cool this season was difficult. ...

“The next level is a business,” Leinart said, shrugging. “I’m playing for passion and for the love of this game. There’s nothing like this right here.”

No argument there. Several hundred Trojan fans filled the Heritage Hall lobby and lawns to cheer Leinart on Friday, and with 90,000 waiting to fill the Coliseum on Saturdays next fall the pull of Trojan Nation is stronger and deeper than ever.

If Leinart had gone to the NFL, he would have hurriedly waded through them to an airplane on his way to a workout center where he would have spent the next three months preparing for the draft.

Instead, he hung around and shook hands and smiled and eventually shuffled off across a campus where clarinet players and joggers and dancers flitted about through the early-afternoon shadows, everyone his friend, everywhere his home.

There are millions of reasons Matt Leinart should have gone to the NFL.

None of which compared to the one reason he stayed.

“I wanted to be here,” he said, his words from another generation, strange, sweet.

*

Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Plaschke, go to latimes.com/plaschke.