LOS ANGELES (AP) – Clay Helton’s unlikely tenure as the head football coach at Southern California began bizarrely and lasted far longer than almost anybody expected.
The folksy Southerner won a Rose Bowl and a Pac-12 title early on, but he never won over most of the Trojans’ fans.
After one more embarrassing defeat for a school desperate to add to its 11 national championships, USC finally moved on.
Helton was fired on Monday, two games into his seventh season in charge. Athletic director Mike Bohn made the move two days after a 42-28 home loss to Stanford that sent the Trojans plummeting out of the AP Top 25.
“I think that in the end, it’s just a sense of ensuring that long-term, we have the ability to build,” said Bohn, who took over the athletic department in November 2019. “I think we’ve made some nice progress in the time that Clay and I worked together. I enjoyed working with Clay. He’s an incredible person, and we did some neat things. … But I think that we’re committed to winning national championships, and we believe that in order to do that, a change was needed.”