There’s No Do-Over for Kiffin

Fourth and two ... fourth and two ...

So you USC fans feel burdened by the memory of the key play in January’s Rose Bowl?

You have no idea.

LenDale White in the backfield ... Reggie Bush on the bench?

So you USC fans feel burned because the play that could have clinched a third consecutive national championship didn’t work?

You should talk to the guy who called it.

White is stopped inches short ... Texas ball ... Texas touchdown ... Texas victory.

“A thousand times, no, a million times,” said Lane Kiffin, shaking his head. “I’ve gone over that play a million times, trying to figure out what I could have done different, what I could have done better.”

He sighed.

“You keep wanting it to go away, but it never goes away,” he said. “I take full responsibility for the play, and for the loss.”

Kiffin is the Trojans’ offensive coordinator, and I was talking to him Tuesday about introductions.

This season, we officially meet him. This season, we officially find out who he is.

With Norm Chow’s best players having followed the shuffling old guru to the NFL, this season is about his swaggering young replacement.

The Trojans’ offense is Kiffin’s guys, Kiffin’s vision, Kiffin’s dreams.

But, first, we have to ask about his nightmare.

Last year, at 30, as a rookie coordinator, with history at stake, the kid put a Heisman Trophy winner on the bench and handed the ball to the other running back.

White was stopped at the Texas 44-yard line with 2:09 remaining, the Longhorns took over, and Vince Young drove them for the winning touchdown in their 41-38 national championship win.

“Yeah, I’ve heard about that play a lot this summer,” Kiffin said. “And, yeah, most of it was about Reggie Bush.”

What he said next tells us the first thing we should know about him.

He doesn’t back down.

“In all the million scenarios I’ve drawn up for that play, not once do I have Reggie Bush on the field,” he said. “What, you have him lined up as a receiver? They’re not going to cover him. Their defensive backs were pressing. They know we’re going to run it there.”

Kiffin wonders, instead, whether he shouldn’t have changed the snap count to set the Longhorns’ defenders back. Or perhaps, he thinks, he should have ordered Matt Leinart to run a bootleg?

The next thing he said tells us another thing we should know about him.

He points the first finger at himself.

“We had all that offensive talent, and we needed to get one more first down for the national championship, two more yards, and I couldn’t do it,” he said.

White later admitted that he’d wrongly bounced outside, instead of waiting for the hole to open. Makes no difference to Kiffin.

“I will never blame LenDale,” he said. “I will never blame the defense. I blame myself.”

It is hard not to like him, an offensive coordinator who takes the bullet for a game in which his team gained 574 yards.

It’s hard not to think he’s on the verge of something big, after an opening weekend in Arkansas during which new quarterback John David Booty was nearly perfect, and his bevy of new running backs averaged nearly five yards a carry, and his revamped offense gained 472 yards on the road in the Southeastern Conference.

And with Nebraska coming in Saturday, it’s hard not to smile when reading this week’s comments in the Lincoln Journal Star, where Kiffin delivered one of the few public rips in the Pete Carroll era.

Like many Trojans fans, he was disappointed with disappearing Dwayne Jarrett at Arkansas.

“He might be living in the past, and that doesn’t do us any good right now,” he told the Journal Star after Jarrett caught only five balls for 35 yards.

When asked about that statement Tuesday, Kiffin did not change his stance.

“I talked to Dwayne about the comments last night. I wanted to make sure he understood how I felt,” Kiffin said.

And that was?

“I was frustrated, he was frustrated, and he should have been frustrated,” Kiffin said. “We did not bring him here from New Jersey to catch five passes for 35 yards.”

Well, OK, so the kid is not Norm Chow.

Instead of a kindly grandfather, he’s more like an agitating big brother.

He pushes the Trojans on the field. Witness his decision to put Booty in an empty backfield situation on fourth and two against Arkansas in the first quarter of Booty’s first college start.

No, they didn’t make it. Booty’s pass to Jarrett was tipped away.

But, yes, Kiffin says he would do it again.

“It isn’t like we just came up with that formation at the last minute,” he said. “We saw something we thought would work, and we went for it.”

He also pushes them off the field, as the guy who slept on an office couch throughout training camp, a guy who unlocks the office every day at 6 a.m.

He’s a younger version of one of his role models, the early-rising Jon Gruden, complete with the slight Southern twang and stalking walk.

“He’s really coming into his own,” Carroll said. “In terms of this season being a big test for him, sure, you could say that.”

Coming into his own means coming out of the shadow of his father, Monte Kiffin, a longtime NFL assistant and former college head coach who was one of Carroll’s mentors.

Some thought Carroll hired Lane six years ago as a favor to his father. Some initially thought of Lane as a teacher’s pet.

It is this perception that eventually led to his apparent estrangement with Chow, who has not spoken to Lane since Chow left for the Tennessee Titans two summers ago.

But it is also a perception that has disappeared as the kid has taken offensive control.

The Trojans go-for-it attitude is his attitude. “I want an explosive offense,” he said. “I don’t like those SEC-type defensive games where one play can decide it, and we will do whatever it takes to get that [explosiveness].”

The Trojans’ pro-style accountability is his accountability.

“We love Chauncey Washington,” he said. “He would certainly be one of the running backs if he were healthy, but if he can’t get on the practice field, what can we do?”

And the Trojans’ Rose Bowl loss was his loss, pushing him forward, haunting him still.

The name of that ill-fated play? He’ll never forget it.

27 Power Quad.

“We’ve run it before,” said Lane Kiffin, his jaw tightening. “And we’ll run it again.”

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

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USC VS. NEBRASKA

Saturday, 5 p.m.

at the Coliseum, Channel 7