5 Worst USC football head coaching hires of all time

With a program as storied as USC football and with a fan base as passionate as the Trojans have, there will always be plenty of opinions about the man running the show. That's been true in lean times and in days of plenty.

What's amazing about the USC program, though, is that of the 26 men to have held the title of head coach, 19 have posted winning percentages over .600. Of course, it helps when some of the best head coaches in the history of the sport such as John McKay and Pete Carroll have patrolled the sidelines at The Coliseum.

Still, there have been some men who didn't live up to the standard that USC expects. So let's take a look at the five worst coaching hires in USC football history.

No. 5 Lane Kiffin (2010-13)

Just because someone can coach, it doesn't make their hiring a good decision. Such was the case with Lane Kiffin who took over at USC in 2010 and was allegedly fired on the tarmac at LAX in 2013. In between was a string of poor decisions and controversies that drug the program down.

Overall, Kiffin's record at USC was not bad. He went 28-15 (0.651) and had a 10-win season in 2011 despite being on NCAA probation.

A former assistant at USC under Pete Carroll, Kiffin hadn't been on the job for six months before the NCAA slapped the program with a two-year postseason ban for violations committed during Carroll's tenure. Obviously, that didn't help Kiffin get off on the right foot.

Still, he did a good job in those two years going a combined 18-7 overall. However, the 2012 season was when things started to fall apart. Despite being ranked No. 1 to start the year, Kiffin's team would go just 7-6 and finish unranked, the first time since 1963 that a team started the season ranked No. 1 but finished outside the top 25.

In 2013, he was fired just five games into the season after a 61-42 loss at Arizona State dropped his team to 0-2 in PAC-12 play. That firing was one of the most talked about coaching moves in college football history given that it supposedly happened on the airport runway.

What makes the Kiffing hiring an awful decision, in hindsight, is that giving the reins of the most popular football program in America at the time, one that entertained celebrities like Snoop Dogg and Will Ferrell with regularity, to a 33-year-old coach who already had tons of baggage was lunacy. What's more, in a time when the program was dealing with NCAA sanctions, a steady hand at the wheel was needed, not a brash, arrogant coach in his early 30s.

Even Kiffin later admitted that his ego played a role in his failure.

"I had a very large ego," he told ESPN last fall. "Kids who are given too much, too early sometimes -- you see it in actors all the time. Sometimes you're not ready for all that. I wasn't ready at 31 to be the head coach of the Raiders, 32 at Tennessee, 33 or 34 at USC. I wasn't ready for all that fame and that money. Some of that is my fault."

No. 4 Ted Tollner (1983-86)

The old sports saying is that you don't want to be the man who follows "the man". But in the case of Ted Tollner, he couldn't follow the man who followed "the man" and that ended one of the golden ages of USC football.

Prior to Tollner's hiring in 1983, John Robinson (his predecessor) and Joh McKay had overseen the Trojans from 1960-82. During that run, the program won five National Championships and twelve conference crowns.

Thus, Tollner was handed a golden opportunity, the chance to run a college football blue-blood that had been humming along at the top of the sport for decades. (In fairness, though, in the last three years of Robinson's tenure, USC did slip a bit failing to win more than nine games in any of those seasons and not winning the league title either.)

Still, Tollner was expected to get USC football back to the top of the mountain. Unfortunately, he did the opposite. He was just 26-20-1 in four years on the job though he did win the PAC-10 championship in 1984.

One issue Tollner had was that he didn't beat USC's two primary rivals enough. He was winless against Notre Dame and just 1-3 against cross-town rival UCLA. That's a good way to be shown the door quickly at USC and that's what happened with Tollner who was fired in 1986.

His reputation isn't helped by the fact that his successor, Larry Smith, would win the PAC-10 title in each of the first three years after the Tollner era proving the USC football was still a force to be dealt with. Thus, Tollner winds up on our list of the worst coaching hires in USC history thanks to his inability to keep the program in the National Championship or even the PAC-10 Championship discussion on an annual basis as the two men before he did.

No. 3 Steve Sarkisian (2014-15)

Personal demons that no one could have seen coming derailed the No. 3 coach on our list, Steve Sarkisian. Hired from Washington over the popular interim USC head coach Ed Orgeron who filled in when Kiffin was fired, Sarkisian was tabbed as a brilliant offensive mind, something that USC has always valued. However, his off-field issues caused his downfall before he was through his second year in L.A.

Things started well for Sark, though. He guided USC to a 9-4 mark and a bowl win in 2014, his only full season with the program.

However, there were repeated incidents of him appearing to be intoxicated on the job and when representing the university at booster meetings. Then, in 2015, when he acted strangely at a team meeting and left the facility before practice, he was put on leave and fired the next day.

Sarkisian, who was going through a divorce at that time, claimed to have an addiction and he would later sue the university for wrongful termination of a person with a disability. That suite was not successful.

There was no indication of any of these substance abuse issues cropping up at Washington where Sarkisian was head coach from 2009-13. However, USC should have done a better job of vetting Sarkisian before handing him the reins of a program still not far removed from the glory days of the Carroll era.

This hire was a poor one because Sarkisian left the program in shambles just after the Kiffin debacle but also because it led to the hiring of the No. 2 man on our list.

No. 2 Clay Helton (2015-21)

Often, coaching hires are reactive moves. Those making the decision usually go for a candidate as opposite from the previous coach as possible. That's not always the way to make a quality decision, though. Such was the case with Clay Helton.

When he was tabbed the interim head coach to replace Sarkisian in the middle of the 2015 season, he was about as different from Sarkisian (or Kiffin) as possible. He was safe. He was reliable. He wasn't going to bring any more embarrassment to the program, at least off the field. That was appealing to a program that had seen its share of controversies since the end of the Pete Carroll era.

What's more, he won five of his seven games as interim head coach before he was appointed the permanent man in charge. However, those in power should have known that his success was fool's gold.

After all, he simply didn't have the qualifications to run a program as high-profile as USC. The problem, though, was that Helton was so liked as a human that those in power overlooked the shortcomings on his resume. He had never been a permanent head coach at the collegiate level so to expect him to be able to restore USC to its place among the nation's elite was laughable.

The problem, though, was that he had early success. In his first season, he led USC to a Rose Bowl win. Then, in 2017, the Trojans won the PAC-12 title.

However, he couldn't sustain the success that had been built largely on the backs of Sarkisian and Kiffin's recruiting efforts. In 2018, despite the PAC-12's collective struggles, he managed to go only 5-7. He would rebound with a decent 8-5 campaign the next year but a loss in the Holiday Bowl isn't up to USC's standards.

In 2020, he guided his program to a 5-1 record in the odd COVID-19 abbreviated season. What's more, the pandemic might have bought him some time as the chaos of the world certainly distracted people from his struggles as head coach. However, in 2021, he was fired just two games into the season after a disastrous 42-28 loss to Stanford.

Helton is by all accounts a good man and his maturity and responsibility were needed after the Kiffin and Sarkisian debacles. However, USC needed more than just a good man. It needed an elite coach and that isn't what Helton was.

No. 1 Paul Hackett (1998-2000)

Sometimes, following in the footsteps of greatness is tougher than one might imagine. That's what Paul Hackett found out when he took over for the legendary John Robinson after Robinson's second stint as USC head coach. Though Hackett had all the pedigree one could hope for, it didn't translate into success in L.A. and because he never had any memorable moments as head coach, he tops our list.

On the surface, Hackett seemed like a brilliant hire. He’d worked under legendary NFL coaches such as Bill Walsh, Tom Landry, Marty Schottenheimer, and under Robinson. What's more, he was regarded as one of the brightest minds in the game as the Kansas City Chiefs offensive coordinator. He had even been a USC assistant during its 1978 co-national championship season.

None of that mattered though. Hackett would go just 19-18 overall in three seasons getting to just one bowl, the 1998 Sun Bowl. He never won a PAC-12 title making him the first coach to fail to do so since Sam Barry (who coached only one season at USC) in 1941.

What was surprising was that Hackett actually recruited well. In fact, he left the cupboard stocked fairly well for his successcor, Carroll, who would win the PAC-12 in just his second year on the job.

However, Hackett couldn't get his talent to execute on the field. That was surprising given that it was expected that he would give USC a strategic advantage since he had been mentored by some of the most iconic coaches in NFL history.

All three seasons of Hackett's tenure saw the program regress. He went 8-5 to start out before a 6-6 campaign and ultimately a 5-6 mark in 2000. That was the program's first losing season since 1991 and only the second since 1983.

Overall, he would go just 10-14 in conference play. That certainly wasn't up to the standard that the program had established.

Unlike other men on this list, there isn't much to point to as a high point for Hackett. He never sniffed a conference crown and only reached one rather insignificant bowl game.

While he didn't have the off-field scandals or embarrassments that other coaches had during their USC tenures, he also never gave Trojan fans anything to believe in. He was an exciting hire when he got the job but that quickly faded when his teams hit the field.

It is hard to have no success at USC. This is a program built for excellence by decades of winning. It is one of the marquee brands in the sports world and at times, the bus almost drives itself to at least eight wins. However, Hackett proved that incompetence can overcome pedigree.

He took over for a coach who had won a National Championship and inherited a healthy and vibrant program. However, he quickly proved to be incapable of leading USC anywhere but to the bottom and so he checks in as the worst USC football coaching hire of all time.