Is USC football coach Clay Helton sitting on the hottest seat in college football?

Is Clay Helton’s seat the hottest of any college football head coach?

It’s pretty simple really: Clay Helton needs to win big or he’s done at USC football.

Helton has been the full-time head coach of the USC Trojans for four years now. Though he is 40-22 overall and 31-12 in conference play, it is a different standard of excellence at USC, or it used to be. Understandably, USC has gone with coaches the athletic department thinks it can control after former head coach Pete Carroll got the program into trouble with sanctions in the late 2000s.

Carroll left for the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks, then USC hired Lane Kiffin, fired him on the tarmac, had Ed Orgeron in-house as interim, didn’t retain him, hired Steve Sarkisian, terminated him for off-field issues and then promoted Helton from within.

Got it? Good. In the words of Radiohead, “You do it to yourself, you do. And that’s what really hurts.”

Despite Sam Darnold carrying a bad coaching staff to a Pac-12 Championship in 2017 and Kedon Slovis showing eerily similar promise these days, Helton finds himself as one of 11 coaches in CBS Sports’ Dennis Dodd‘s eyes that need to start improving or they’ll soon be gone.

In fact, Dodd not only labels Helton as one of six Division I coaches with a 5-rating of “win or be fired”, but his seat is the hottest of any coach in the country. If Helton doesn’t feel the heat, he wakes up and feels nothing. The pressure is one and the Trojans need to win at least nine or 10 games this year for him to get another season.

"The best outcome for Helton may be football not being played. That gives him a mulligan year but would further infuriate a large portion of USC fans who demand change. When new athletic director Mike Bohn retained Helton, some loyalists threatened to withhold donations. The Trojans could easily win the Pac-12 South for the third time in five years under Helton. He has a better winning rate than Kirk Ferentz, Tom Herman and Dan Mullen. He has won the Pac-12 and a Rose Bowl. But the Trojans fans want national relevance, and they want it now. Mostly, they want Urban Meyer."

Should Clay Helton’s seat be the hottest in college football?

There are a handful of things working for Helton to keep his job, as well as several others very much working against him. The good news is his Trojans play in the easier of the two Pac-12 divisions. The Pac-12 South has as one consistently strong team in Kyle Whittingham’s Utah Utes. However, the Utes have never won a game at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in their history.

While Herm Edwards’ Arizona State Sun Devils seem to be on the come-up, we need to see more consistent offensive firepower from Tempe if we want to view the Sun Devils as anything more than the third-best team in the Pac-12 South. The UCLA Bruins are a hot mess under Chip Kelly. The Colorado Buffaloes are rebuilding under Karl Dorrell, as the Arizona Wildcats aren’t good.

Helton has Slovis at quarterback and a global pandemic working in his favor as Dodd suggested. With rival UCLA falling apart at the seams because they purchased Kelly fool’s gold, USC’s lackadaisical approach to being nationally relevant isn’t as pressing as it would be playing in the Pac-12 vs. the Oregon Ducks and the Washington Huskies, as both teams are humming.

What is working against him is Mario Cristobal is building a national power up in Eugene. If Jimmy Lake is every bit as good as his mentor Chris Petersen says he is, U Dub could stay nationally relevant as well. Lastly and absolutely most importantly, Mike Bohn isn’t Lynn Swann or Pat Haden as an athletic director. He’s an outsider now asked to fix the dysfunctional USC Family.

At his former post at the University of Cincinnati, there exists a college coach capable of making the leap to a major Power 5 job in Luke Fickell. After being too green for the gig in a brutal 2011 season at Ohio State, we can’t reasonably expect Fickell to stay in Cincinnati forever. He has to be a serious candidate to replace Helton if push comes to shove.

If Group of 5 coaching prospects isn’t your thing, what about Matt Campbell at Iowa State? How much money will it take to get James Franklin to leave Happy Valley for Southern California sunshine? Is chasing the golden goat that is Urban Meyer still worth it? Meyer is a legend in college football. Campbell won’t stay in Ames forever and Franklin is a top-10 coach in the sport.

Unless you think UCLA is down with firing Kelly, then Helton is on the hottest seat of them all.

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