Mike Celizic

This ought to be a delicious time for USC fans, a time for soaking up the anticipation and euphoria of one more game against cross-town rival UCLA and then yet another trip to the BCS championship game on Jan. 8.

But it’s not. The many indescribable pleasures of a championship countdown are adulterated by the anxiety that no matter what happens, Pete Carroll, the author of USC’s return to the very top of his sport’s pecking order, could be leaving.

The talk has started already. The Arizona Cardinals, who last year drafted one of Carroll’s greatest players, 2004 Heisman Trophy winner Matt Leinart, are rumored to be interested in hiring Carroll. They’ll throw huge amounts of money at him — Charlie Weis kind of money — maybe give him total control of the football operations, reunite him with Leinart, present him with the opportunity to breathe life and ambition into the NFL’s most perennially pathetic franchise.

It will be tempting both to his bank account and to an ego that twice was severely bruised in NFL head coaching jobs with the Jets and the Patriots. Total control. The NFL. Matt Leinart. How can he resist?

For his sake as well as for that of USC and college football, I hope he rejects the idea out of hand — after first wringing a healthy raise out of USC, of course; there’s no sense wasting all the leverage a serious outside job offer can bring.

He’s a great college football coach, maybe the best walking a sideline today, and the embodiment of what college football would like to be about. He enjoys the heck out of his job and believes that big-time sports are actually fun. His enthusiasm and playfulness are perfectly matched with the college game, and his stature at USC is already reaching iconic proportions.

He can stay until he’s older than Joe Paterno and Bobby Bowden combined, if he wants. He can have a building, a street, the whole darned town named after him. He can look forward to being cast in bronze and stood next to Tommy Trojan. He can keep USC great for years and years to come, pile up wins, recruit the next Heisman Trophy winner, outfox Weis and Notre Dame, have a seat next to Leno any time he needs to tell the nation what he’s thinking.

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How can he leave?

And yet coaches like him leave all the time, some to glory and others to something less than that. It’s not that the NFL is demonstrably a higher calling; it’s not. It’s just the way human beings are built.

It’s in our nature to never be satisfied. It’s why no matter how much you give your kids, they always want more, why we live in houses instead of caves, why we keep trading in perfectly good automobiles every couple of years to get the latest model with one more gizmo and two more gadgets than the old one.

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And it’s why people with what those who can never have it would call the perfect job leave to go to a job  men like Carroll may persuade themselves is even better. Or, if not objectively better, than more challenging.

Carroll is an intelligent man; he knows how good the job he has is. But he’s also a man who likes a challenge, and people like that find themselves always having to move on. Rick Pitino is one of those. Larry Brown is another. Bill Parcells is a third. They are energized by a new challenge, but once the job becomes routine, they start looking for the next adrenaline rush that comes with a new address.

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For the sake of college football, I hope that Carroll stays where he is. He has a chance to be a legend at USC, which automatically would make him a legend in the greatest amateur sport of them all.

The NFL may be a bigger challenge, but nothing compares to the status enjoyed by a great college football coach. Nothing.

Vince Lombardi, Curly Lambeau, Don Shula, Paul Brown, George Halas, Chuck Noll and Tom Landry achieved iconic status in the NFL, but can anyone argue that their names echo louder through the generations than those of Amos Alonzo Stagg, Fielding Yost, Knute Rockne, Ara Parseghian, Red Blaik, Woody Hayes, Bear Bryant, Bobby Bowden, Bo Schembechler and Joe Paterno?

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There are other advantages to a college job.

If it’s money that floats Carroll’s boat, he should think twice about what that big pro salary actually works out to over the life of the job. Does he want to make $6 or $8 million a year for five years or $4 million a year for as long as he wants to keep working? The pro job will end sooner than he wants it to. That’s all but guaranteed. The college job will go on as long as he keeps his team competitive, and Carroll doesn’t seem like the kind of coach who’s capable of a series of truly bad years. 

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