re: Is Miles a Top 10 head coach?

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If it weren't for the rankings the recruiting services do, I don't think people would suggest he has "underachieved".

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It's amazing how fans have come to put so much stock in the rankings of recruiting services

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I'd say the draft is ahead of recruiting rankings, on the list of reasons people think USC is head-and-shoulders above every other Pac 10 team, talent-wise

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He's laid back and is a great recruiter.

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he had a better record at Okie State than Jimmy Johnson did, right?




But that does not really matter.

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It does if you are using his record at Oklahoma State to make the argument that he's not a top 10 coach, which you obviously are. It's nearly impossible to win consistently at Oklahoma State. Jimmy Johnson and Les Miles managed to win more than they lost, which is a monumental achievement.

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23 Reasons Why A Profile of Pete Carroll Does Not Appear in this SpaceBy J.R. Moehringer

1. ACCEPTING HIS LOAN OF A SHIRT MIGHT HAVE BEEN

Pete Carroll, head coach of the football team at the University of Southern California, turns to me one night around 8 p.m. and says he’s got something to do, somewhere he needs to be. We’re standing outside his office at Heritage Hall, the redbrick headquarters of USC’s athletic program, the trophy-filled heart of Troy . I ask Carroll where he’s going, what he’s doing. He doesn’t answer.

I ask if I can come along. No, he says, absolutely not. I ask again. Sorry, he says. I stare imploringly. OK, he says, looking me up and down"but you’d better change. He rummages through a small wardrobe in the corner of his office and finds a white polo, which he flips to me like a screen pass.

Put this on.

How come?

Your shirt, it’s blue"you might get shot.

Where the hell are we going?

He walks quickly out of the office.

2. HE OFTEN WOULDN’T LET ME TAKE NOTES, SO SOME QUOTATIONS ARE APPROXIMATIONS FROM MEMORY

While wriggling into Carroll's shirt, I hurry to keep pace. It’s not easy. Carroll’s normal gait is what others might call a wind sprint. Down some stairs, around a practice field, through a parking lot, we zoom across campus. He tells me to stow my notebook. It might make the people we’re meeting uncomfortable.

Who are we meeting?

Look for a blue van, Carroll says.

A blue van?

There, he says. Sure enough, a blue van is double-parked at the corner, and beside it stands our driver and escort for the night, a deep-chested, gentle-voiced man named Bo Taylor. I climb into the backseat. Carroll rides shotgun.

Along the way Taylor tells me that he and Carroll do this often. They make late-night journeys through the dicey precincts of Los Angeles. Alone, unarmed, they cruise the desolate, impoverished, crime-ridden streets, meeting as many people (mostly young men) as possible. The mission: Let them know that someone busy, someone famous, someone well known for winning, is thinking about them, rooting for them. The young men have hard stories, grim stories, about their everyday lives, and at the very least Carroll’s visit gives them a different story to tell tomorrow. Carroll says: “Somebody they would never think would come to them and care about them and worry about them"did. I think it gives them hope.”

Few fans of USC, Carroll concedes, know that he spends his nights this way. He’s not sure he wants them to know. He’s not sure he wants anyone to know. I ask what his wife of 31 years, Glena, thinks of these excursions. He doesn’t answer. (Days later Glena tells me with a laugh that she doesn’t worry about Carroll driving around L.A., but she drew the line when he mentioned visiting Baghdad.)

We start in east South-Central, a block without streetlights, without stores. Broken glass in the gutters. Fog and gloom in the air. We hop out and approach a group of young men bunched on the sidewalk. Glassy-eyed, they’re either drunk, stoned, or else just dangerously bored. They recognize Carroll right away. Several look around for news trucks and politicians, and they can’t hide their shock when they realize that Carroll is here, relatively speaking, alone.

Carroll shakes hands, asks how everyone’s doing. He marches up and down the sidewalk, the same way he marches up and down a sideline"exhorting, pumping his fi st. At first the young men are nervous, starstruck , shy. Gradually they relax. They talk about football, of course, but also about the police, about how difficult it is to find a job. They talk about their lives, and their heads snap back when Carroll listens.

A car pulls up. Someone’s mother, back from the store. She freezes when she sees who’s outside her house. Carroll waves, then helps her with the groceries. He makes several trips, multiple bags in each hand, and the woman yelps with laughter. No, this can’t be. This is too much. Pete Carroll? Coach of the roughest, toughest, slickest college football team in the nation, schlepping eggs and soda from her car to her kitchen?

Next we drive to the Jordan Downs housing projects , one of the most dangerous places in L.A. We find a craps game raging between the main buildings. Forty young men huddle in the dark, a different sort of huddle from the ones Carroll typically supervises. They are smoking, cursing, shoving, intent on the game, but most fall silent and come to attention as they realize who’s behind them. Pete Carroll, someone whispers. Pete Carroll? The most famous sports figure in the city, excluding Kobe Bryant? (Maybe including Bryant.) Pete Carroll, mentor to Carson Palmer, Matt Leinart, Reggie Bush, LenDale White"here? A sweet-faced teen named Jerome steps away from the game. He stares at Carroll, shakes his head as if to clear it. He says the same thing over and over. Pete Carroll in the ghetto. Man, this is crazy. Pete Carroll"in the ghetto! Crazy.

Some time after midnight Carroll and Taylor head for the van. Time to get back to Heritage Hall, where Carroll will catch a few hours of sleep on his office floor before his assistant coaches start showing up. A young man stops Carroll, takes the coach aside and becomes emotional while explaining how much this visit has meant to him. He gives Carroll a bracelet, something he made, a symbol of brotherhood and solidarity. Carroll accepts the bracelet as if it were a Rolex. He’ll wear it for days, often pushing back his sleeve to admire and play with it. He gives several young men his cell phone number"something he’s never offered me"and tells them to call if they ever need to talk. One, an ex-con, will call early the next morning and confide in Carroll about his struggles feeding his family. Carroll will vow to help find him a job. (So far, Taylor says, Carroll has found part-time jobs for 40 young men.)

Driving back to campus, Taylor is bleary-eyed, I’m half asleep, and Carroll looks as if he could go for a brisk 5K run, then start a big home improvement project. I ask Taylor if people on the streets ever seem suspicious of Carroll. Do they ever think he’s grandstanding or recruiting"or crazy? Taylor says he’s heard almost no cynicism, though he admits that he was doubtful at first. “Pete was like, ‘I want to go through the community with you,’ ” Taylor says. Sure, Taylor told Carroll, assuming it was just talk. Then, late one night, Taylor’s phone rang.

Hey, Bo, what’s up?

Not much. Who’s this?

Pete.

Pete who?

Pete Carroll. Hey, man, I’m ready, man. When can we go out there?

Taylor was stunned. Not only did Carroll follow through, but there was something in his tone. He was asking to visit neighborhoods where police don’t like to go, and he was asking without fear. “He asked like he wasn’t afraid,” Taylor says. He turns to look at me in the backseat, to make sure I’m sufficiently astonished or to make sure I’m still awake. “He asked that shite like he was not afraid.”

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5. THERE’S NOTHING IN MY NOTEBOOKS

Even when he's not holding back, Carroll crosses me up by repeating stories and quips to other writers. He’s promiscuously quotable, spreading his wit willy-nilly . He doesn’t understand, or care, that we’re all trying to wring something new out of him. He tells me a great story, never before published, about the time he hit bottom in New England. Unable to sleep, he flipped on the TV and found a movie about Babe Ruth. He watched Bostonians booing Ruth and thought: Those are the same guys who boo me as I come through the tunnel every Sunday, and they’re booing the greatest baseball player of all time! He was able to laugh, to lighten up, to feel a connection with the Bambino, which got him through the hard times. I write it all down. Days later he gives the same story to The Boston Globe.

I can’t count the number of times I hear Carroll being pithy with a reporter, e.g., “I always think something really good is about to happen” or “Sleep is overrated,” then say the same thing to another reporter a day or two later. Worse, when he does say something new, something legitimately juicy, he gives my tape recorder the big eye and says"Off the record. He goes off the record like Lindsay Lohan goes off the wagon. I like him (another reason I can’t profile him, shouldn’t profile him), but I’ll never forgive him for declaring one particularly delicious rant against a fellow coach"an “a-hole” and “a fricking a-hole”"off the record.

More confounding, Carroll’s conversations and private interactions are note resistant. Looking through my notebooks, I find page after page of fragments, moments, scenes that seemed poignant or telling at the time and now feel thin. He might be too evanescent, too ephemeral. His essential aura might lie outside the ken of shorthand.

For example, Carroll tells me he suffers from attention deficit disorder . “Self-diagnosed,” he says, kidding, but I concur with his joke diagnosis. Besides leaving half his sentences (and meals) unfinished, he’s in constant motion, tapping his foot, jiggling his leg, swaying to music, playing drums on tables and dashboards. He’s also endearingly absentminded. For the longest time he had no e-mail, because he couldn’t remember his password. He misplaces his cell phone charger. He loses his keys, locks himself out of his office. (Twice in one 24-hour span.) Days after our drive around South-Central, we bump into Taylor at a charity event. Carroll tries to introduce us. We both look at him, bewildered. I gently remind Carroll that the three of us just spent six hours together.

But then this. I’m watching him watching film. In one hand he holds a laser pointer, in the other a remote control, which freezes the action, runs the play backward and forward at diff erent speeds. Without taking his eyes from the screen, he casually asks Nick Holt, his defensive coordinator, how things went at the doctor. Holt, sitting to Carroll’s right, grunts that a thing on his skin is precancerous and will need to be removed. Like the players on the screen, Carroll abruptly stops, midmotion. He stares at Holt, unblinking, gauging Holt’s level of concern. He stares until Holt lifts his head from what he’s reading and looks Carroll straight in the eye. “It’s nothing,” Carroll says.

“Yeah,” Holt says, and shoots Carroll a grateful grin.

No earthshaking words. No grand gesture. Just a sudden payment of attention, despite an attention debt, because attention is the thing most needed. Just a focus of his personal laser, as in his hand. In my notebook it says:
It’s noth"

Doesn’t blink. Doesn’t jiggle leg

Just stares

In my memory it feels like much more.

6. THERE’S NOTHING ON MY TAPES

On two separate occasions, though I aim the tape recorder at Carroll’s mouth, I later discover nothing on the tape but sibilant mumbles. I hear his voice, then a rustling, then silence, then garble garble"it’s spooky. The tape recorder is brand-new. It was the most expensive one they had at Radio Shack. It picks up my voice fine. When Carroll speaks, the recording sounds like an articulate man gagged and locked in the trunk of a car.

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9. I APPLIED CARROLL’S COACHING METHODS TO MYSELF"NO LUCK

When he’s not helping them conquer their fear, Carroll is preaching to his players about fun. He urges them, if they do nothing else, to have fun, because fun is a natural antidote to fear and a prime motive for most of the things we do.

People who know him best invariably seize upon fun to describe Carroll, either saying it’s fun to be around him or that he’s forever having fun. His emphasis on fun comes mainly from his DNA but also from his reading, specifically W. Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis, a 122-page book with a cult-like following. (The latest edition features a foreword by Carroll.) Using tennis as a prism through which to view all human endeavor, Gallwey says we focus too narrowly on results. “The three cornerstones of Inner Game,” he tells me, “are Performance, Learning, and Enjoyment . Usually people put Performance first, and Learning and Enjoyment are almost absent.”

If we focused more on Enjoyment and Learning, Gallwey says, we’d perform better and we’d be a lot happier: “You look at a child. He learns while he plays. Anything he tries to do, or win at, he’s playing, he has a wonderful time doing it. They’re not separate things for a child. That means to me these things are inherently built into human beings. Most human beings, you have to coach what’s already inherent"that is, the drive of excitement to learn and keep learning, and the drive to enjoy. It gets really covered up when winning is everything. I agree with Lombardi: Winning is everything. It’s just what your definition of winning is.”

Defensive end Lawrence Jackson, cocaptain of the team, says he struggled last year, recovering from an injury, fighting to play his way back into shape, until Carroll gave him a copy of Gallwey’s book. Jackson’s game, and his life, changed. “He was telling me to settle down and kind of get back to having fun,” Jackson says of Carroll. “Who knew that it was going to come down to 120 pages of a book?”

I study The Inner Game of Tennis. I try to have fun with my Carroll profile. But I’m caught in a trap. The more I learn about Carroll, the more there is to learn. The more time I spend with Carroll, the greater the pressure. As pressure increases, enjoyment decreases. As enjoyment decreases, performance plummets.

Sensing my rising tension, Carroll can hardly conceal his pity or his amusement. He asks what my plans are for the week. I tell him I’ll be reading about him, thinking about him, trying to figure out how to synthesize all I’ve seen, heard, and read. He smiles and says something that, unless I’m hearing things, sounds like “Poor guy.”

10. HE’S NOT FINISHED

Carroll dislikes “goals.” He doesn’t use the word, makes a face when I use it. So let’s say he’s undertaken two enormous tasks, and he can’t be judged fairly"or profiled"until he succeeds, fails, or quits.

His first task: Turn USC into the grandest college dynasty ever. Not this week’s number one team but history’s. “To win forever,” he says, and before this year he looked to be well on his way. He’d won back-to-back national championships and come within 19 seconds of another. (He still goes over critical decisions in that 2005 championship game against Texas, when the Trojans had the lead late but couldn’t bottle up mighty Vince Young.) He put together a 2007 team that was fast on defense, loaded on offense, the heavy favorite to win the third championship of the Carroll Era.

Then came week five and a series of disturbing setbacks.

There was the inexplicable collapse against Stanford, the most improbable loss by an “overdog” in college football history, according to oddsmakers. There was the flare-up of an old scandal surrounding Bush, the virtuoso former tailback, who stands accused of taking $280,000 in improper payments while a student athlete. (Should Bush be found guilty, the NCAA could levy hefty fines against USC.) There was a rash of injuries on offense, decimating a corps that was supposed to dominate and sidelining John David Booty, the starting quarterback, who cracked a finger on his throwing hand. Suddenly, people were questioning the invincibility of USC and its coach.

Carroll’s second task, however, is even more lofty and less likely to be finished soon. Having achieved job security for the first time in his life, he’s expanded his work to include the city beyond USC. Some want to save the world"Carroll wants to coach it. He’s launched a foundation, A Better LA, aimed at motivating on a large scale, at ending violence in the inner city, and he now takes time each week to think and talk about problems other than what to call on third and long. With any coach who’s still coaching, drawing conclusions can be hard. His legacy is always in flux; it hinges on what happens next Saturday. But when a coach is remaking himself into a social activist, when he’s just beginning the task for which he may one day be best remembered, firm statements feel that much more ridiculously premature.

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