For coach Pete Carroll, watching the NFL draft on Saturday was a bit of a reprieve from the bad news that has engulfed his University of Southern California team recently. The four top prospects were drafted below -- in some cases, far below -- expectations. And yet, that was still the best part of Carroll's week.
"We had a lot of stuff going on," Carroll said in a telephone interview on Sunday. "I don't stress about the draft at all. That's the best part -- we had all those guys drafted."
Eleven USC players were drafted over the weekend, but the football program has probably not had such a bad week in quite a while.
Four months ago, the Trojans were playing for their third consecutive national championship, they had a player who had won the team's third Heisman Trophy in four years, and they were the toast of Los Angeles.
The downturn began April 22, when the nation's top-ranked high school quarterback, Jimmy Clausen, who lives in Southern California, rejected USC and committed to play at Notre Dame.
That was bad, but the news that could really wreck USC's future broke the next day, when it was reported that Reggie Bush's parents had been living rent-free in a house that was owned by a man who had hoped to help market Bush and steer him to an agent. The Pacific-10 Conference said it would investigate, and the NFL alerted several teams Friday that Bush and his family might have been on the receiving end of an extortion attempt.
Carroll said he told a Los Angeles-area reporter two weeks ago that, with all the success the Trojans had had in the past few years, they had done it scandal-free.
Carroll said he still did not know the entire story behind Bush's troubles, but that the people who surround successful college players, hoping to ingratiate themselves before the money starts pouring in, would not go away. He said he was particularly disturbed by the timing of the Bush articles, which seemed to him intended to inflict maximum damage on Bush. He called it "an ugly thing."
"When you have guys of this magnitude, people want a piece of them," Carroll said. "Look at Reggie's deal, that's a classic case. We talked about this years ago, that if we were successful, we would position ourselves where everybody would be scrutinizing us. We tried everything we have to be the most outstanding and the most upfront program."
He added, "There are things we have to do better."
That will undoubtedly include warning players to stay out of trouble. On Wednesday, quarterback Mark Sanchez, a candidate to start next season, was arrested on suspicion of sexual assault. No charges have been filed, but Sanchez has been suspended.
The arrest prompted Carroll to say that it was his worst week since going to USC in 2001. "One of our players got in trouble, that's a difficult situation for everybody involved," he said.
A little after 8pm Friday, USC was shaken again when the Houston Texans announced that they were passing on Bush as the first overall pick and had signed North Carolina State's Mario Williams. Saturday dawned with Bush still on the board and a published report that running back LenDale White had failed a drug test; the report was quickly denied by White's agent. After the Titans selected White in the second round, Tennessee coach Jeff Fisher told reporters that the story was false.
But by then, Bush, Matt Leinart, White and Winston Justice had been drafted lower than many had expected; Leinart dropped to 10th overall and White and Justice fell all the way to the second round. Carroll is a former coach of the Jets and the New England Patriots, so he knows the calculus of draft choices.
Carroll offered these explanations for what happened to the USC prospects: Passing on Bush might have been a negotiating issue for the Texans; White could not run for teams at USC's pro day, and that probably hurt him; and Justice, who came out as a junior, could have used another year of college.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier