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LOS ANGELES -- This one is for the players. For the past several weeks, USC players made it abundantly clear they wanted Clay Helton’s interim label removed and for him to be named the team’s permanent head coach. They respected and appreciated him as a person, they liked how the atmosphere around the program became more family-oriented and they were dreading the thought of another change in leadership, which would have been the program’s fifth in the span of about 26 months. They also knew their voices only carried so much weight. All the public statements of support and #Helton2016 hashtags would have been for naught if it didn’t supplement on-field success. Winning is what matters, and the Trojans understood that. And even winning, as the older players learned when Ed Orgeron was bypassed for Steve Sarkisian in 2013, does not guarantee anything. After USC started 3-2 and Sarkisian was fired in October after reportedly showing up intoxicated to team meetings, the season appeared headed for disaster. Instead, the Trojans, after dominating rival UCLA 40-21 Saturday, are one win away from their first Rose Bowl appearance since the 2008 season. That’s Helton’s doing. “I think [the UCLA win] explained enough,” sophomore receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster said. “The way it went was because of Coach Helton. The play calls that he made.”  Helton is not the big-name, win-the-press-conference hire many USC fans desired. He doesn’t have an extended track record of success as a head coach (he’s never even held a permanent head coaching job) and there will undoubtedly be a decent-sized faction of the fan base that will be vocal in its displeasure of athletic director Pat Haden’s decision.
For the players, though, the hire was a best-case scenario. Whether that’s how a coach should be hired is a different conversation, but there shouldn’t be any concerns about the mood of the locker room for the foreseeable future. When Helton was asked Saturday if he had done enough to be named the Trojans’ head coach, quarterback Cody Kessler, sitting beside him at the press conference, jumped in before he could answer. “Absolutely,” he said. In a word, it summed up the feeling of the rest of the team. “We want Coach Helton, plain and simple,” junior linebacker Su'a Cravens said. “We don’t need to meet with Pat Haden, he knows. We want Coach Helton back next year, so we’ll do our best to try and get him back here.” Cravens, a potential first-round draft pick, even went as far as to say if Helton was hired, he would seriously consider returning for his senior year. Whether that is true or not, the sentiment was still clear: Helton has a real connection with his players. USC needs a change of culture, and while on the surface it might not seem that keeping a coach hired by Lane Kiffin and kept on by Sarkisian accomplishes that, Helton’s conduct during the past several weeks has proven otherwise. His ties to Kiffin and Sarkisian have been justifiably perceived as a negative for his chances at landing the job, but Helton is not in their mold. He’s humble, he’s mature and, after his two predecessors, those are welcome traits.
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