Robinson to Get Sequel at USC : ANALYSIS : Process Apparently Began Long Before Freedom Bowl

As it turns out, Larry Smith, recently fired USC football coach, came close to getting out the door before the Trojans pushed.

It has been learned that Smith was a leading candidate for the Auburn football job vacated last month by Pat Dye, and that he traveled to Atlanta for an interview for that job Dec. 14.

The job eventually went to Terry Bowden, son of Florida State Coach Bobby Bowden. But Smith’s receptiveness to another job indicates that much has been going on for quite some time behind the scenes at USC.

Smith had three years left on his contract to coach the Trojans, and while Auburn is also a prestigious football school, anybody with any sense of security at USC certainly wouldn’t be reading the want ads.

So the Smith-to-Auburn scenario raises a kind of chicken-or-egg question. Did Smith trigger the USC search--one that will bring the official announcement of John Robinson’s return to the Trojans--or was Smith a goner, anyway, and the timing of the Auburn interview merely a coincidence? Mike McGee, USC’s athletic director, when questioned Saturday about Smith’s interview with Auburn, refused to say whether that event triggered his search, or whether his search had already begun.

“I will say that our search process has been going on for a couple of weeks,” McGee said.

Either USC began looking for a new football coach as a defensive measure in case Smith went to Auburn, or Smith was a goner well before last Tuesday night’s Freedom Bowl embarrassment against Fresno State.

Chances are, the latter is the case. Chances are, all the meetings and hectic activity shortly after the Fresno State loss were merely the last acts in a play that had begun shortly after Notre Dame played its most recent of 10 consecutive Victory Marches.

So much of what has gone on has been clear as mud. Several elements made it that way:

--Because USC is a private school, the length of Smith’s contract was not revealed until Friday, when he was officially out. It turned out that he had three years to go, a pretty hefty contract for USC to buy out or negotiate a payoff for, and had that been public knowledge, the speculation that he would get one more year would have increased greatly.

--On the surface, McGee looked like your basic lame duck. About the time Smith was flying to Atlanta, McGee was off to Columbia, S.C., for an interviewing process that led to his acceptance of the position of athletic director at the University of South Carolina. --With McGee then appearing to be a lame duck, just riding out his time at the Western USC until being released for the Eastern USC, the presumption was that any action taken against Smith would be initiated by School President Steven Sample. But Sample hasn’t really been here long enough for observers to get a reading on where he stands on football as related to academia and the relative fund-raising merits of both.

--Also, why would McGee want to get involved with something so crucial to the future of Trojan athletics and so unrelated to his future? Why would the Trojans even want him to be involved?

--And why would USC even entertain thoughts of changes in its football program before a new athletic director is found? That’s a little like recruiting the star quarterback before hiring the head coach. What if they don’t get along?

When questioned about these things Saturday, McGee said that, while many of the recent perceptions by the public and press have been logical, they haven’t always been on target.

“First of all, anybody who knows me knows that I never function as a lame duck,” McGee said. “President Sample made it quite clear to me, that I am the AD, and I will be so until such time as I am released to go to my next position.”

McGee said that he had gotten an agreement from John Palms, president of South Carolina, to delay his arrival in his new job if the Trojan football situation needed further attention, which it obviously did.

McGee also said that he discussed the situation of a future unknown athletic director as the new boss with the candidates for the football job--he acknowledged that there were two--and said that “they felt that that created no great problem.” The translation there apparently is that John Robinson thinks he can live with about anybody in the AD chair.

McGee said that the search for the football coach and athletic director are two entirely different processes. “In your search for an athletic director, you are dealing with a broader constituency,” he said.

In a short time, the game of musical chairs at USC will be over. Robinson will be the football coach, McGee’s replacement will arrive and McGee will depart. And Larry Smith will be hired somewhere on some level to do what he is still quite capable of doing very well: coach football.

Looking back on it, it will appear quite simple.

It wasn’t.