sc85sis":15m21qmy said:
Sgt. Largent":15m21qmy said:
I saw this on Twitter yesterday.
It'll be interesting to see how he's received, as most USC fans I know are still royally pissed at Pete for leaving the program suddenly, and under the guise of impending sanctions.
You'd think USC would have let a little more time lapse before doing this, so the wounds aren't so fresh with the boosters and fans.
The USC fans who are mad at him are in the minority as far as I'm aware. When Matt Barkley broke USC's TD record in 2012, they played a video on the Coliseum HD board with messages to Matt from Trojan greats and other local sports stars. There was applause for Carson Palmer, Matt Leinart, Keyshawn, et al. When Pete came on there was a HUGE roar of cheering and applause.
As someone else mentioned, he also had a great reception at his recent appearance on campus.
In my experience, the fans who are mad are those who only got the sanctions story from the press and don't know much about just how bad of a hatchet job the NCAA did.
I read the entire NCAA report regarding the USC sanctions several times over. I do not agree that it was a 'hatchet job.' They spent 4 years investigating that program and the hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of payments/loans received by Reggie Bush and O.J. Mayo, along with other lesser violations.
I don't know how much Pete knew of what was going on, but there's no doubt that USC's athletic department, of which Pete was a major part of, was a poorly run, poorly monitored program. Not all of it was Pete's fault as much of the blame has to fall on the shoulders of Mike Garrett, the AD at the time, as their compliance department was woefully inadequate when compared to similar programs the size of USC's. But the football team was/is the 500 lb. gorilla in D1 college athletic departments, and the head coach is always the one that's held accountable.
What I blame Pete for was that he ran a very loose ship, allowed virtually unrestricted access to his locker rooms, practices, sidelines, even post game in his locker room, whereby some of the leaches looking to cash in on some unsuspecting, dirt floor poor, babes in the woods, naïve athletes that were unaccustomed to the kind of money those leaches were flashing in front of them. Heck, Pete even posed for a picture with Bush and some middle aged white guy that turned out to be one of the leaches that was 'loaning' Bush tens of thousands of dollars, without so much as asking someone "who is that guy?" I don't accept the "Don't blame me, I was just the piano player in the whorehouse" excuse. If he didn't know, he should have known.
But that's all water under the bridge now. Pete's our coach, the best one we've had in our franchise IMO, and he can coach my team as long as he wants. What happened at USC has nothing to do with his present situation in Seattle.