Introducing: House of Troy

Our story begins in November 2000, at a critical fork in the road for USC football.

USC had just fired its head coach, Paul Hackett, after three seasons.

The Trojans hadn't been contenders on the national stage for years.

Morale was in the tank.

There was a lot of outside pressure.

People were just not very content with the program.

That's Darrell Gross.

He was a right-hand man of USC's athletic director, Mike Garrett.

He was also the guy in charge of finding USC's next football coach.

We were looking for a successful college football head coach.

And that's really how we started the hunt, looking for that.

And Dennis Erickson was a prime candidate.

Erickson was the coach at Oregon State at the time, and he definitely checked all the boxes.

He was a well-established college coach.

He'd won two national titles at Miami.

And he was the Pac-12 coach of the year the previous year.

It made sense.

So USC moved quickly, offering Erickson a five-year contract.

But just as soon as they closed in, Erickson backed out.

I

thought it was a done deal.

And so for me, I'm like, what? You know, he had all but committed to the job.

Rejected by his first choice, Gross turned his attention to a coach right down the road, Oregon's Mike Belotti.

I interviewed with them.

They offered me the job.