Pete Carroll was tremendous. Howard Jones is the man who started it all at USC football. Yet, the greatest head coach in Trojan football history has to be John McKay. Four national championships in a span of 13 seasons is a mic-drop-level achievement. USC's greatest period of success came under McKay. As older fans know, McKay was a product of the Oregon football program.
"John McKay played at Oregon in the late 1940s and immediately moved to the Ducks' coaching staff in 1950," we wrote. "In 1951, McKay’s second year as a UO assistant, a coaching change occurred. Len Casanova replaced Jim Aiken, who ran the program into the ground in four short seasons. Casanova could have wiped the slate clean, but he retained McKay. The two remained together
on the Oregon staff for eight seasons, through 1958. They helped lead Oregon’s 1957 team to the Rose Bowl against Woody Hayes and Ohio State. In 1959, McKay scratched his itch and wanted to go to Los Angeles as a USC assistant under then-coach Don Clark.
"After Clark lost to Notre Dame and UCLA in a promising 1959 season which fell short of its potential, the USC head coach resigned. (Side note: A man who accompanied McKay on Clark’s 1959 USC coaching staff was none other than Al Davis, who was about to join the nascent American Football League and eventually become the father of the Oakland Raiders. The rest, as they say, is history.) John McKay was hired before the 1960 season. He got his big break at USC. He certainly made the most of it.
"A full 16 seasons later, by the time his USC tenure concluded at the end of 1975, McKay had won four national championships and reached eight Rose Bowls, winning five of them. He lost only three times in 11 meetings with Ara Parseghian’s great Notre Dame teams of the 1960s and early 1970s. USC was as great as it had ever been under McKay, the best coach in USC’s post-World War II history. This career would not have become so luminous, however, had McKay not received guidance and wisdom from Len Casanova and the Oregon Ducks, who shaped his life in and beyond football."
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This article originally appeared on Trojans Wire: USC football's greatest coach of all time came from Oregon
