USC players praise Ed Orgeron, want him to stay
By Mike Dyce
The USC Trojans beat the No. 4 Stanford Cardinals on Saturday night. With that win, interim head coach Ed Orgeron might have earned the vacant head coaching job with the Trojans.
“Coach O needs to be here next year … we want Coach O next year,” freshman Su’a Cravens said, via the Los Angeles Times. “Forget the hiring, forget all that. We got Coach O and that’s all we need.”
Cravens made a late fourth-quarter interception that set up the game-winning drive. Redshirt junior safety Dion Bailey, who also had a key interception agreed.
“Coach O has made up for my early three years in … six games,” said Bailey. “This will be the most memorable season of my life.”
“When you have a father figure like Coach O come in here and take us under his wings and treat us like his own, we just want to run through a brick wall for him,” USC linebacker Hayes Pullard said, via ESPN. “He didn’t call us out; we just went up there as one team, one heartbeat. He said that the first day and we just wanted to carry that over.”
Quarterback Cody Kessler was also amongst those praising him.
“Coach O is very unique,” Kessler said. “There’s no one in the country like him that I’ve seen or that I’ve met. I speak for the whole team, we absolutely love him. He’s awesome. He’s amazing. He has that look in his eye when he’s talking to you that you can see that he really, really does care. He really gets emotional and he really puts everything he has in this team and he wants us to succeed so much. When I gave him a hug, I saw his eyes water up because he just cares so much and he loves us so much, and we feel the same way about him.”
Orgeron certainly deserves the job. The Trojans are on a four game winning streak, they’ve won five of the last six, and they have a respectable 8-3 record. Orgeron won’t take credit for the turn around, he gave that to his players in an incredibly classy move.
“I don’t know if I pulled them together, they just came together,” Orgeron said. “They did it, I didn’t do anything.”
The Trojans better keep him or another school will be thrilled to have him.