At USC, we were very sensitive about making typical hard-sell promises to our recruits. So we promised them one thing: an extraordinary opportunity to compete for a position from the moment they arrived on our campus. In my nine years at USC we had freshmen starting at every position, including quarterback. As far as I know, no other team in college football has done that. I cannot overstate what an advantage it gave us. Our veteran players knew that if they did not compete to their fullest at all times there was nothing to keep a young guy from taking their place. And for the recruits, knowing they had the opportunity to compete from day one made them work harder, smarter, and with more ambition. We conveyed our expectation that every incoming player had the chance to start in his first year. That wasn’t just a promise; we expected it.
The competitive opportunities proved to be an incredibly powerful recruiting tool. However, we didn’t have this policy just to attract recruits. We discovered that by setting these high expectations and using supporting, consistent language, we could enable a freshman to contribute immediately.
When we recruited players, we always made a point of explaining that our goal was not to make them Heisman Trophy winners or All-Americans. We didn’t promise trophies, titles, or even that they would start—much less play. As coaches, we would create opportunities for them to show their value and worth to the team and perhaps earn a starting position. What we did promise at USC, and will continue to do so at the Seahawks, is that all players, be they freshmen or rookies, seniors or veterans, would be given an equal opportunity to compete for a spot right away. That wasn’t a sales pitch—it was the truth.
By being open-minded that first-year players could help us win, instead of thinking that they would get us beat, we felt we created an advantage at USC. Most personnel guys in the NFL think that playing rookies is the last thing a coach would want to do. But when I arrived at USC as the head coach and the man responsible for our personnel, I quickly altered my perspective on prospects.
In fact, we began to rely on freshman playing a significant role immediately. We discovered that their game experience contributed not only to early-season victories, but also provided depth and production late in the season. It’s probably no coincidence that USC went undefeated in November for eight consecutive seasons.
There is probably no better example of someone contributing from the outset than former Trojan Reggie Bush. It’s amazing that it took us so long to decide to offer Reggie a scholarship because his film was so unusual that we couldn’t really tell what sort of player he would turn out to be. When I’m looking at prospects, the most important things I’m looking for are competitive will and love of the game. It was obvious Reggie had extraordinary talent, but it was his desire to separate from the crowd to be special that we questioned.
With Reggie, it was just so easy for him in high school that it was hard to tell. I must have watched his high school film thirty times, and time after time he was jogging into the end zone with no one else in the frame. I remember during one of our recruiting meetings I learned that his high school quarterback was Alex Smith, who would go to play at Utah and eventually be selected by the 49ers, as the first overall pick of the 2005 NFL draft. For all the times I studied those tapes before making a decision, I had never noticed Alex—I just couldn’t take my eyes off Reggie. He was just so fast. Once we got him to USC, it only took a few minutes into the first practice to see that he was going to be a great contributor, but until we knew that, we could only hope that in addition to his extraordinary talent, he had that competitive drive. He did, of course—in a tremendous way, as he left USC with a Heisman Trophy and as an All-American, and this past season helped the New Orleans Saints become Super Bowl champions.
It’s a common misconception that coaches dislike hitting the recruiting trail, traveling around the country, and driving from high school to high school. The truth? Some like it and some don’t. Before I went back to college football, other coaches told me that recruiting was a burden. However, for me recruiting was just another way to compete. Once again the philosophy came through as we found ourselves immersed in just another competitive arena. We found ourselves in a “relentless pursuit of a competitive edge” in recruiting and it took us right back to our central theme of competition. This was not only a perfect extension of everything we were trying to do at USC, but also a great job by the recruiting coordinators I was able to work with, Ed Orgeron, Lane Kiffin, and Brennan, my oldest son. Our recruiting classes were at or near the top for eight straight seasons, and that is a credit to our entire coaching staff.
Recruiting was our chance to meet the players who would become the lifeblood of our program. It was as important as anything we did. As we would build our team each off-season, there was nothing more exciting than meeting the families and coaches of our prospects. USC offered a unique situation, as we were able to recruit some of the most talented athletes in America. What was even more exciting was that we felt that each freshman truly had a chance to play for us in the fall.
The recruiting process has accelerated and intensified in recent years, due in part to the Internet and the increased media attention paid to promising high school players. These developments—and the sometimes sensible, sometimes not-so-sensible rules that have been put in place to protect recruits or promote prospects—have altered the rhythm of the process and made it all more formal. The fundamentals of what we were looking for remained the same, and they always would, as skills and talent were just the beginning of the process, but surely not the end. They may have been enough to bring you into our selection process, but if that was all you had to offer, that process was going to be a short one. We needed something additional on top of that, something that would translate into an uncommonly competitive performer.
Every year at USC, we would recruit the most talented high school players in the country—kids with exceptional raw abilities, who were also being recruited by most other major football programs. You wouldn’t really think that confidence would be a problem, but in fact, we found that this was a very important issue. I don’t care how much of a star you had been in high school or how much raw talent you might have; coming to the USC football program was like getting dropped into the deep end of the pool. Virtually every member of the team possessed equal or greater talent, and certainly the older players had more experience. Not every recruit was equipped to handle this situation, so we looked for players who showed the kind of fortitude it took to compete at a college program already filled with topflight athletes.
This isn’t just a football thing—it’s a dynamic that leaders have to learn to manage in any organization that recruits the best to work alongside the best. Not only were we watching out for the younger players and nurturing their confidence, but we also needed to continually support and challenge the veterans. We knew we were walking a fine line in creating this competitive culture.
My favorite part of recruiting at USC was sitting in a player’s living room, learning about his family and how he was raised. It was extremely important for me to meet our recruits’ families, but even more important was that a recruit’s family had a chance to meet our staff and me. After all, they would be sending their son to Los Angeles, sometimes far away from home in Florida, New Jersey, or Texas, with the trust that I would care for him as if he were my own child.
On National Signing Day, when we would add twenty or so top recruits to our program, we had a team meeting where we showed a highlight film of those incoming freshmen to our returning players. I reminded them that our staff had told those young players being featured on the big screen that they would be getting a fair shot from the moment they stepped on campus to compete for a starting position. It was a fun meeting, as the players suddenly became expert analysts, critiquing the incoming players who, more than likely, would be going after their spot. It was a blast to observe this meeting, as we were sure to remind the veterans that they had been told exactly the same thing when they had arrived on campus. It proved to our entire team that there was always an opportunity for every player to compete.
Our players knew that the only way to earn the right to be on the field was by competing for it, and they also knew that we would respond accordingly. When a recruit arrived as a freshman, we respected the effort he had put into his preparation to be there. We were far more wary of setting expectations too low than of setting them too high, and by placing great expectations on our student-athletes, our coaching staff had the belief they could field a championship team year after year.