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Pat Haden Retiring As USC Athletic Director: What Will His Legacy Be?
Pat Haden will resign in June as the USC athletic director after bringing a steadiness to a volatile situation, but his era and his legacy could turn out to be known for his coaching hires.
February 5, 2016
Daily Cavalcade of Whimsy: Pat Haden will resign in June as the USC athletic director after bringing a steadiness to a volatile situation, but his era and his legacy could turn out to be known for his coaching hires.
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I was getting a hard time writing it during the Stanford game, but Haden didn’t come down to the field to try bailing it out.
“The night the Hacienda opened. Everyone wanted to play. Bowie, Queen, The Stones. I chose A Certain Ratio, because they were my band. And that was the point of the Hacienda. It was a place for people we knew, people we could trust.”
But how will Clay Helton do?
Of course, Haden has been one of the key figures in history collegiate athletics as the leader and quarterback on two of USC’s national title teams in the mid-1970s, he was a terrific TV color analyst, served as a part of the original College Football Playoff selection committee, and most importantly, he was the one who came in to help pull his school out of the fire.
It’s not fair that USC happened to be the last college football program that’ll ever be nailed with major NCAA sanctions for something truly silly, but Haden came in at time when the program needed someone to provide leadership and a reputation that was above reproach. It needed someone with the reputation and the status to show the world that everything was going to be back on the right track, and despite walking into a disaster, the team turned out okay on the field.
Most pertinent to the job he was really hired to do, USC’s football program generated over $34 million in revenue in 2011 and Haden helped step things up to about $45 million in 2014 while taking the athletic department as a whole to over $100 million a year in revenue.
However, considering Texas cranking out over $100 million a year from its football program alone, now the next AD hire has to be a true businessman who can take what Haden did to a whole other level once the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum is renovated, as a start.
But was Clay Helton the right hire?
Haden, for all he did, is the guy who canned Lane Kiffin after calling him off the bus, and will always be remembered for the hiring and clumsy firing of Steve Sarkisian, and for running down on the field like a sports parent to argue with officials in the 2014 Stanford game.
And then he hired Clay Helton to be the full-time head coach.
It’s not that Helton isn’t a good prospect, or that anything is wrong with him, but with bigger names, bigger resumes, and bigger A-list types out there, Haden’s final big act was to make the bold move of elevating a relative no name. And now, the first thing a new athletic director is going to want to do is find his own head football coach – if Helton doesn’t take USC back to Pac-12 and national championship heights.
Haden gets credit for being a good athletic director overall, and he’ll probably do even more as a key figure in the stadium renovation efforts, but the fans just care about whether or not the football team wins. If the football team wins, the money comes in, and the athletic department works.
By the way, USC opens the season in Texas against Alabama, and goes on the road to play Stanford two weeks later.
