Pat Haden Should Have Fired Steve Sarkisian In August

USC Football Coach Needed To Be Let Go After Salute To Troy Embarrassment

It’s easy to picture Pat Haden, on a calm Sunday morning at a USC basketball event, suddenly thrust into another issue with his football coach.

He receives a call, the coach is missing, was apparently intoxicated at a team meeting and is not at practice.

So Haden has to suddenly go into crisis mode, put the coach on a leave of absence, name his temporary successor, tell the media, look for and hire a new coach and deal with all the scrutiny the situation deserves, both internally and externally.

Yet he could have avoided all this had he done the right thing and simply fired Steve Sarkisian after the coach’s intoxicated embarrassment at the Salute to Troy booster event in August.

But he didn’t, apparently hoping things would just take care of themselves. This never works, of course, and only leads to continued problems down the road.

Perhaps he didn’t want to look for a new coach just a year after hiring this one. Or his judgement was as blurred as Sarkisian’s vision, on the pre-season Top 10 ranking and some misguided analysts’ yapping that the Trojans were a College Football Playoff contender.

When a crisis arrives, the chief executive must deal with it at the time. Haden did not and he’s paying for it now.

So, too, is the USC football program.