USC vs. UCLA: For one coach, it’s an especially big game

As you know, this game is about a coach.

Two teams, 79 meetings’ worth of memories, but it’s really only about one coach.

When USC and UCLA take the field Saturday, you know one coach will be carrying all the weight, feeling all the heat, hogging all the cliff.

You know one coach needs to win this game to salvage a season, a reputation and perhaps a career. You know that if this one coach loses, even though it seems as if he just arrived, next season could conceivably be his last.

You know that one coach’s future in Los Angeles may rest on this one game.

What you may not know is that this coach is USC’s Lane Kiffin.

“I would say that is a fair assessment,” Kiffin said.

The embattled Bruin Rick Neuheisel? For now, his future is a non-issue. He has an athletic director who hired him and is wedded to him for at least two more years. He has boosters who like his enthusiasm and are busy directing their anger toward his coordinators. He has an undermanned team that is not supposed to win.

Lane Kiffin has none of these things. Stuck between an athletic director who didn’t hire him, boosters who are mostly wary of him and a team that doesn’t always play for him, he works on an island that could seemingly get washed away at any moment.

If he loses to UCLA a week after losing to Notre Dame, the tidal wave is coming.

“I’m the head coach, I’m the one responsible for all this,” Kiffin said Thursday after the bowl-banned Trojans’ final practice of the season. “So, yes, going into this game, I face a tremendous amount of pressure.”

It’s understandable to think that role would be played by Neuheisel. For most of this season, the eternally optimistic frat boy has been an easy target with his big smiles amid confused losses, while Kiffin has quietly muddled about in boring mediocrity, only occasionally showing signs of life that were embraced as visions.

As recently as three weeks ago, after the Trojans’ win at 18th-ranked Arizona, I actually wrote that Kiffin was turning “a lost year into found promise.”

But two games and two bad defeats later, and it’s a lost year again, with all signs pointing toward a kid head coach struggling to be a head coach.

Of the Trojans’ seven wins, only one has come against a ranked opponent. Of their five losses, they blew fourth-quarter leads in three of them.

“After handing away so many games, yeah, I better win this last one,” Kiffin said.

There have been penalty issues, clock management issues, and how-can-Allen-Bradford-gain-223-yards-in-one-game-and-carry-the-ball-once-in-another-game issues.

“I’ll admit, we don’t have an identity, and that’s not something good to say with just one game left in the season,” Kiffin said. “We don’t know who we are.”

Then there are motivational issues. For all of Pete Carroll’s cavalier flaws, he knew how to convince a team to finish strong, winning four of his last five games in his struggling rookie season here while winning his first 28 games in November.

Kiffin has won only two of his last five games, and lost twice in four November games.

“We certainly haven’t come together,” Kiffin said.

Oddly enough, it seemed that it all came together for Kiffin in the fourth quarter against Notre Dame last Saturday when Pat Haden, the Trojans athletic director, sang his praises in a televised interview.

But understand two things about that interview. First, Haden was speaking before the Trojans blew another late lead. And, second, it is Haden’s style to kill someone with kindness.

“They told me that Pat said I’d be around a long time, so I guess I’m safe,” Kiffin said, pausing and smiling. “For 48 more hours.”

I like Kiffin. He has done wonders to erase the rascally reputation he brought here from Tennessee. His group has been marked with a certain maturity and civility that was missing from previous Trojans teams. The coach has been accessible and accountable and even graceful.

Off the field, the guy has seemingly succeeded. But on the field, he has struggled, and if he loses to UCLA, one could even say he has failed, and everyone knows what that could eventually mean.

“At the end of the day, we all know what everything is based on, and it’s wins and losses,” Kiffin said.

If Kiffin loses to UCLA, he begins next season in the sort of hole from which it may be tough to get out. Will he have to — gulp — cut loose defensive coordinator and father Monte? Will he have to bring someone in to help him call plays? Will anybody ever forget that it was Kiffin who was directing the Trojans offense in the potentially national title-costing 13-9 defeat to UCLA in 2006?

If Kiffin loses to UCLA, the guess here is that Haden’s eyes will start wandering, and another bad year would give the boss the perfect excuse to carve his legacy as Trojans athletic director by hiring his own head coach.

A game with only bragging rights on the line? For all, maybe, but one.

bill.plaschke@latimes.com

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