A Milestone For Pat Haden

HADEN.NIKIASWith beach volleyball winning the NCAA title Sunday, it marked the first NCAA championship won by a coach (Anna Collier) hired during Pat Haden’s tenure. Now whether it was that difficult to figure out who to hire for beach volleyball is another matter. But all the previous USC titles won since Haden took over were by coaches already in place.

If you want to say Haden was not running the beach volleyball coaching search, then Mike Garrett gets little credit either because most of the successful coaches he hired were brought in by other administrators.

Since 2007, USC’s won 17 NCAA championships. That is second overall to Penn State, which has won 18.

9 thoughts on “A Milestone For Pat Haden

  1. Most Athletic directors don’t know how to hire coaches, anyway, because they look at everything but the resume…lol especially, Pat Haden. Who could imagine, Haden looking past Jack Del Rio, and Chris Petersen, and deciding to go with a Drunk, Clown ?

    • It seemed like Mike Garrett was excellent. Jack Swarbrick is a dooouche (but so are a lot of the great old warhorse ADs, thinking of the Deloss Dodd of Texas). Ian McCaw at Baylor has really created incredible revenue and visibility while dealing with some black-eye moments.

      I would say the same thing about the Florida’s Jeremy Foley is probably one of the best and Bowlsby was great for Stanford setting them on course and pretty good in duct taping that Humpty Dumpty of the Big 12 together since he left.

      Garrett was given the run of the Athletic Department under Sample, and he made the decisions and they were great. Considering the PAC 12 which has never really had leadership and USC’s role which is to avoid leadership for fear of conflict, Garrett was the man, perhaps the best USC has seen in the modern era.

      Scott Wolf needs to get over his pettiness and recognize that while the man wasn’t always the nicest to deal with if you were a jerk reporter, Garrett was one of one the best.

  2. Who had “First by a Haden-hired coach” in the guess Wolf’s negative spin on the women winning a beach volleyball national championship pool? I was way off. I had “Sark used to watch them practice”.

  3. It seemed like Mike Garrett was excellent at hiring decisions, and there is no doubt that Garrett while having people work under him as they should, was always the man making decisions. He was also the guy who didn’t mind lighting a fire under anyone.

    Garrett does well in comparison with other great ADs of his time. Jack Swarbrick is a dooouche (but so are a lot of the great old warhorse ADs, thinking of the Deloss Dodd of Texas). Ian McCaw at Baylor has really created incredible revenue and visibility while dealing with some black-eye moments.

    I would say the same thing about the Florida’s Jeremy Foley is probably one of the best but Florida has great conference leadership.

    The only people I think that were better than Garrett were Bowlsby- he was great for Stanford setting them on course and pretty good in duct taping that Humpty Dumpty of the Big 12 together since he left.

    Garrett was given the run of the Athletic Department under Sample, and he made the decisions and they were great. Considering the PAC 12 which has never really had leadership and USC’s role which is to avoid leadership for fear of conflict, Garrett was the man, perhaps the best USC has seen in the modern era.

    Scott Wolf needs to get over his pettiness and recognize that while the man wasn’t always the nicest to deal with if you were a jerk reporter, Garrett was one of one the best.

    • Garrett did not know what end was up. Yes, Hackett was a great hire plus forcing Hue Jackson on him while demoting Ken O’Brien. He was oblivious to Carroll which was all Gross who promoted him. Every top coach that turned Garrett down got a very hefty raise by using that fool as bait. His deal with Gillespie to insert the son-in-law Kreuter took the baseball program to near bottom. Threw Floyd under the proverbial bus to save football which backfired big time. Using the word great with Garrett is a sad state of affairs. He did a real bang up job at Langston in Okla. which got him dismissed after bragging they were going to become some super power.

      • Garrett was despised by many USC coaches during his tenure. Some literally went out of their way to avoid ever encountering him. They just made sure to never cross his path if they could help it. He just had a bad way with people and he served up USC on a platter to the corrupt NCAA with his public remarks about jealousy, et al. He needed to be cut loose bad.

        While he received a lot of bad pub over the John Robinson firing (dismissal via phone message), I never held that against Garrett. Robinson was avoiding him and the inevitable and wouldn’t take his calls so Garrett really had no other choice. Robinson disguised his ego and could be very disarming. Garrett never heard of such a thing and it led to many embarrassing situations for him.

      • That’s ridiculous. First, Hackett came in to a program that was a mess. Their was the SAT scandal, kids who were lazy, and not too long before a kid actually sued USC for lying about playing time! SC had become a bloated, fat joke of a program. People don’t like to give credit to Hackett for the one thing he did do which was to throw a bunch of kids out and create some more discipline. But Hackett who unarguably was one of the great OCs in the game at the time, had one foot out the door waiting to get back to the NFL and gave the program less than its all though he obviously brought in some serious talent, talent that would result in Heismans.

        EVERYONE uses an offer for employment as leverage. That’s one of the more stupid things to bring up and shows how desperate you are to make an argument. As for baseball, he kept around a great coach for a long time while everyone was betchin and moaning because he knew that there was the issue of being an expensive private school in LA that didn’t offer subsidized tuition like Stanford, etc. Kreuter was what, a 50% winner, Haden’s hire was a 43% winner who got caught cheating, or he’d still be around… But you are using baseball because we did so well in the other sports it was the only thing to hang your hat on. Alright.

        And the man got Cheryl Miller and Stan Holt to coach at a bottom rung HBCU, giving them the best quality of athletics they ever had and increasing their graduate rate. What did you think, they were going to switch divisions, get a billion dollars and win DI championships? SMH. Come on man, just give someone their due.

  4. The strain on your face in trying to craft your snarky post is telling. Congrats Pat & the Women of Troy! And congrats for all the other Natties – no matter who hired the coaches or recruited the kids. It’s one hell of a school….

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