COLLEGE FOOTBALL ’87 : COACHES, PLAYERS, TEAMS AND TRENDS TO WATCH THIS SEASON : GETTING THE JOB DONE : Smith Has Succeeded in Teaching USC a Thing or Two

The new coach shows up, and everybody’s waiting to check him out.

Is he tall? Is he small? Does he bite? Does he bark? Will we like him? Will he like us? What will he put us through? What can we put over on him? Are we about to play for the best coach we’ve ever played for? Or are we stuck with a guy who doesn’t know a right guard from a can of deodorant?

“They’re eyeballing you,” said Larry Smith, “and you’re eyeballing them.”

In this case, Smith already knew something about USC’s football players before he became their coach last Jan. 2.

He knew plenty of them from Pacific 10 Conference games during his seven years of coaching at Arizona.

He knew Rodney Peete because the Trojan quarterback’s dad, Willie, was on Smith’s staff at Tucson, and because Rodney’s brother, Skip, played wide receiver for Arizona, and because Rodney himself had once been the ultimate 12th man of any college football team--the water boy.

The quarterback already was familiar with the new main man, already knew what to make of him. “He’s a fine man and a great coach,” Peete said.

Upon becoming the coach at USC, though, Smith technically found himself in a room full of strangers. To most of the players, he was as anonymous as his name. They didn’t know if he would make their old coach, Ted Tollner, seem like a pussycat in comparison, or whether Larry Smith would let them slide and glide into a new season while needing the first few months just to connect faces with names.

If they were expecting camp to be the Big Easy, they were mistaken. Work was hard, right from the snap. There was conditioning, running and pumping iron. The Trojans got stretched as far as they could go. Compared to what some of them went through, Rocky Balboa was a guy who did a couple of pushups.

“The conditioning was probably the toughest they’ve ever faced,” Smith acknowledged. “We really pumped it to them. And at the beginning, it was a real disaster. Guys weren’t used to what we wanted. They lifted four days a week and ran four days a week. There was one swing day when they did both.”

Since the coach’s first game was scheduled for Labor Day, he was making the team look forward to the holiday as a day of rest from practice.

Workouts got tough and then got tougher. Smith, a notorious early riser, determined that his players should follow his example if they truly wanted to catch the worm. When the full squad assembled in August, two-a-days began with practices called for 8:30 in the morning. Defensive players got to warm up for hitting opponents by first giving forearm shivers to their alarm clocks.

Smith’s intention was to be hard, but fair. “We’re not going to try to run roughshod over these kids,” he said. “We’re not here to try to cut down or wipe out what’s been done in the past. We’re not into rolling heads when guys make mistakes, or telling players that they aren’t worth dog (leavings). Screaming and yelling and ramming stuff down players’ throats isn’t what it’s all about.

“But, we believe we have a good teaching staff, and we’re out to teach these guys a different way of doing things. We’re trying to teach fundamentals, teach hitting, teach intensity, and do whatever it takes to become winners, but we also realize that we haven’t joined a bunch of losers here. We’ve come into a program that is not rock bottom. All it needs is re-direction.”

Questions, of course, will soon be answered. How the Trojans will play for Larry Smith and his staff will become evident beginning Monday, when they open the season with a nationally televised game at Michigan State. How Smith will do in the hot seat of USC football is something that will be judged over the course of years, not days, but a fast start would make things considerably easier.

The more immediate question, meanwhile, of how USC’s players have accepted Smith as their new coach is getting a little more obvious with each passing day. He is no longer a stranger to them, that is for sure. His manner, his mannerisms, his face, his voice, his graying hair, his Teddy Kennedy eyeglasses, his Clark Gable ears, his bark, his bite--they are all part of Trojan football now. Larry Smith has arrived.

There was, for example, the “Rookie Show” that took place recently on the campus of UC Irvine, where the stadium-less USC players were working out. Similar to the talent contests and hazings familiar to first-year players in pro football, the rookie show invites USC’s new players to get up in front of the squad and do a little something.

Walk-on defensive back Frank Hearst stepped to the front of the audience of teammates and gave them the once-over. He pushed a pair of eyeglasses toward the tip of his nose, Teddy Kennedy style, and ordered the players to attention.

They knew that look and that sound. They had seen and heard it from Larry Smith just about every day. And when they laughed, “Coach” Hearst warned them about outbursts in team meetings.

“OK, tonight, I know we’re all tired,” he said. “Stay up till 10:30 if you want, and I’ll let you rest tomorrow morning. You can stay in bed till 6:45.”

Again, the players laughed.

“I don’t want to hear any back talk!” Hearst said.

He was followed on stage by another young defensive back, Brandon Bowlin. Instead of an impersonation of the coach addressing the team, Bowlin did college football’s most recognizable voice, Keith Jackson, interviewing USC’s new coach, playing both parts.

Jackson: “Coach, I’d like to know about those ears. Is it true that you once flew over the world in 80 days and 80 nights without a plane?”

Smith: “No, that’s just a rumor.”

When he did the coach, Bowlin peeled off his own warm-up pants to reveal a pair of tight gold shorts like the ones Smith wears, and tucked his hands into the band above the belt, just the way the coach does--a little Arnold Palmer hitch. He didn’t have to say a word. The guys knew who he was doing.

“Do I hear some laughing?” Bowlin barked.

Nobody barked back.

“I didn’t think so!” he said.

Imitation being the most sincere form and all, Smith should be pretty flattered by all this. A coach whose guts were being hated would usually have them hated behind his back. But a coach who is mimicked on a team’s talent night must realize that he is now officially being recognized as part of the program.

Larry Smith wants to fit in, every bit as much as he wants to restore USC football to power. Sometimes, you can’t do both. Bo Schembechler, his former boss at Michigan, didn’t win over everybody. There were people among the 100,000 in the crowd and among the 100 in the locker room who were very pleased that he won, but didn’t particularly care for the way he did it.

Smith, who worked on Schembechler’s staff for two years at Miami of Ohio before moving to Michigan with him in 1969, was offensive line coach for the Wolverines for four seasons, and therefore was spared most of the attention, pro and con, that came the head man’s way.

“You talk about pressure. Hell, I remember after the second year we were there, we had won one championship and we had lost one game, one regular-season game, in two years. And we were beating people 35-0, 42-0. We come into our third year, and we’ve got a good offense, a great offense, but no quarterback.

“So, we’re winning games 20-7. We’ve got (Reggie) McKenzie, and (Billy) Taylor, and (Dan) Dierdorf’s a senior. I mean, we’ve got some damn fine players. But absolutely no quarterback.

“So, we line up full house, wishbone, and are just controlling the football, keeping our defense off the field. And people are booing us! We beat Navy, second game of the season, 14-0, and they hated every minute of it. They practically booed us out of the stadium. They want to see us beat Navy, 40-0.

“So, (Schembechler) has been through it all. And he’s also been used to being thoroughly dominant, him and Ohio State. Now he’s fighting Iowa, which he’s had some hellish games with, and Michigan State has come up there, and Purdue’s slipped down, but you know Purdue will be back, and Illinois can be tough. You just don’t beat everybody 40-0 every game, every season.”

So it goes. The losers want to be winners, and the winners want to be big winners.

USC went 9-3 under Ted Tollner in 1984, his second season, and won the Rose Bowl, and continued the school’s fine tradition of kicking tail.

The year before, however, the Trojans had gone 4-6-1, and even during the coach’s much better second season, they lost to UCLA and Notre Dame, and won other games by scores such as 6-3 over Arizona State, 19-9 over Oregon, 29-27 over Washington State, 17-14 over Smith’s Arizona team, 20-11 over Stanford, and 16-7 over Washington.

Where were the thrashings of yesteryear, alumni wondered. John Robinson’s 1982 squad whipped Stanford by 20 points, Oregon by 31, Oregon State by 38 and Cal by 42. His 1976 club beat Purdue by 18, Stanford by 24, Oregon by 53, Iowa by 55 and Oregon State by 56. They were Murder, Inc.

As for John McKay’s USC teams, well, consider the 1972 outfit, the one that outscored opponents by the gaudy total of 467-134. That squad scored 24 points or more in 11 of 12 games.

The people who follow USC football, the people who want to see Traveler the Trojan horse riding around the Coliseum as proudly as Alysheba instead of moping around as listlessly as Mr. Ed, simply could not stand what was happening during the last two years of Tollner’s regime, even though neither team had a losing record.

Losses to the likes of Baylor, Cal and Washington State were maddening, and whenever UCLA, Notre Dame, Alabama or Auburn was there for the taking, it was the Trojans that got took.

Larry Smith, feeling the heat, understands, that at USC, it is not only that you win, but how you win, and whom you beat.

“Fan-wise, pressure-wise, prestige-wise, for our people, the two most important games are UCLA and Notre Dame,” he said. “But you can win or lose people real fast.”

In other words, while the Oct. 24 game at South Bend, Ind., and the Nov. 21 appointment with UCLA can be season-makers, these first few games can either keep the customers satisfied or make them wonder if they have chosen the wrong man.

“I look at Michigan State and Boston College, and those could be the two most important games of the season,” Smith said.

“The first step is always the hardest and the biggest, in my experience. It can give you momentum, get you off to a good start, or it can get you spinning your wheels. Look at Ohio State last year, 0-3. Look at UCLA, with that bad start at Oklahoma. You’d rather not have to bounce back from something like that if you can help it.”

At Michigan State, five days before his 48th birthday, Smith may not find it easy. His defense will be confronting a running back, Lorenzo White, who is out to win the Heisman Trophy, while making do without the 100% good health of their own best running back, Steve Webster.

“But it doesn’t matter who you’re playing,” Smith said. “The big factor is: Let’s take care of us. If we do what we’re capable of, we should be capable of playing with anybody.

“The fact that it’s their first game playing for us is probably more of a factor than the fact that it’s the first game of the season. These kids have never been on a field with us, and we’ve never been on a field with them. The object is to have as much confidence as you can in people, without actually having ever gone to war with them.”

As for the great expectations of those who fire coaches with 7-5 records, well, Smith is prepared to deal with that.

“I think the expectations of the players here are very high,” he said. “Our expectations at Arizona grew over the years.

“The first year I was there, it was: ‘Let’s try to win a game once in a while. Maybe even have a winning season.’ After we got that hurdle cleared, then it was a matter of: ‘Let’s make a run for the championship.’ And after a few years of that, you expect to compete for the conference championship every year.

“Here, though, it’s more like . . . well, not ‘This better be the year,’ but something close to that. It’s like, if you can win the right two or three games, you’re looking at a sure conference championship, and you’re looking at maybe a shot at the national championship. That’s the difference between here and there.

“I’ll be more specific. At Arizona, our thought was that if we win nine games, we might have a shot in the conference, and to get to a bowl game, we thought we had to win eight. We weren’t sure that winning seven would get us there. Whereas here, if you win seven games, you know that we’ll go to a bowl game. Even if we win six, we’ve got a chance to go.”

How many will USC win in Larry Smith’s first season?

“I’m not a guy to make predictions,” he said, although somewhere he has locked away a slip of paper with a best guess on it. “But I’m an optimistic coach. I look at these guys, and I don’t know that we have great, great talent, but I’m convinced they’re going to get as much as possible out of what they’ve got. That’s the optimist in me.

“USC can be the best. I don’t know if it will be, but it can be.”

Anybody laughing?

Didn’t think so.