[pcgoode]

You are correct about Carroll.  Let me rephrase - Can we continue to count on USC hiring bad coaches in the post-Carroll era?  This is what I should have asked and was thinking about when I started the thread.  

I disagree with the premises behind this question. 

For one, I think people underappreciate what a fit Pete Carroll was. I think he was somewhat uniquely qualified to handle the opportunities and challenges at SC. Carroll was a cheater at SC but had the insight to draft Sherman and Baldwin, and I've watched interviews with him and one of his strongest traits is that he welcomes and can work with a lot of different types of personalities. He says he'll take loud players, he'll take quiet players, and he develops a culture that welcomes different people. SC may get an "embarrassment of riches" in their recruiting, but every year, it's going to be a challenge dealing with locker room full of prima donnas. I think Carroll -- a skilled and flexible people manager -- was a great fit for it. It's possible SC will one day duplicate it, but for any given hire, it's unlikely. It's not that Stanford got "lucky" with their previous coaches, it's just that it's rare when a program happens upon exactly the right coach at the right place and time.

The second premise I disagree with is that, as it's written it sounds as if Stanford is somehow "lucky" to beat SC most of the time, and it's only due to some kind of administrative "mis-steps" that it happens. To Shaw's point in his weekly statements, Stanford is a great program and has been for over a decade. Get over the past. As Shaw also pointed out, Stanford has a winning record in the past decade against almost all the teams in the Pac-12 (in citing examples, I believe he missed Utah).

I feel like even fans here bash the Pac-12, but I think people really underestimate the conference and unjustifiably bad-mouth it. People probably thought Ed Orgeron was another one of those terrible SC hires, and then he goes off to LSU and wins a national championship. People claimed the Pac-12 had inferior coaching talent but it seems to me that Alabama can't score points unless it has a Sarkisian or Kiffin on its staff. And Stanford beat all those coaches.

[pcgoode]

You are correct about Carroll.  Let me rephrase - Can we continue to count on USC hiring bad coaches in the post-Carroll era?  This is what I should have asked and was thinking about when I started the thread.  

I disagree with the premises behind this question. 

For one, I think people underappreciate what a fit Pete Carroll was. I think he was somewhat uniquely qualified to handle the opportunities and challenges at SC. Carroll was a cheater at SC but had the insight to draft Sherman and Baldwin, and I've watched interviews with him and one of his strongest traits is that he welcomes and can work with a lot of different types of personalities. He says he'll take loud players, he'll take quiet players, and he develops a culture that welcomes different people. SC may get an "embarrassment of riches" in their recruiting, but every year, it's going to be a challenge dealing with locker room full of prima donnas. I think Carroll -- a skilled and flexible people manager -- was a great fit for it. It's possible SC will one day duplicate it, but for any given hire, it's unlikely. It's not that Stanford got "lucky" with their previous coaches, it's just that it's rare when a program happens upon exactly the right coach at the right place and time.

The second premise I disagree with is that, as it's written it sounds as if Stanford is somehow "lucky" to beat SC most of the time, and it's only due to some kind of administrative "mis-steps" that it happens. To Shaw's point in his weekly statements, Stanford is a great program and has been for over a decade. Get over the past. As Shaw also pointed out, Stanford has a winning record in the past decade against almost all the teams in the Pac-12 (in citing examples, I believe he missed Utah).

I feel like even fans here bash the Pac-12, but I think people really underestimate the conference and unjustifiably bad-mouth it. People probably thought Ed Orgeron was another one of those terrible SC hires, and then he goes off to LSU and wins a national championship. People claimed the Pac-12 had inferior coaching talent but it seems to me that Alabama can't score points unless it has a Sarkisian or Kiffin on its staff. And Stanford beat all those coaches.