Michael Ventre

LOS ANGELES - Let me be the contrarian for a moment. Allow me to provide the moment of levity at the wake. Permit me to sort through the USC wreckage and find that one child’s doll that remained unharmed. It’s sitting right next to the glass that is half full.

It isn’t so bad, really.

If you’re a USC person, you probably are staggering from the blows delivered by the NCAA today: a reduction in scholarships; a loss of previous victories; and especially a two-year bowl ban. You’re probably feeling disappointment, anger, frustration. That’s understandable.

But don’t be despondent. It’ll blow over. In some ways, this is the best thing that could have happened to your school.

First, accept the fact that USC deserves this. When you’re naughty, you need to be punished. Clearly, from both the original Yahoo! investigation and the four-year follow-up by the NCAA’s rapid response team, USC was smack in the middle of the Reggie Bush shenanigans. And apparently, the NCAA found some institutional culpability, whether through a direct connection, or simply by turning a blind eye.

If you had a friend who was an alcoholic and/or an addict, and he had a hit-bottom incident, and from that he turned his life around, wouldn’t you say that was positive? USC has to admit that it has a problem.

This is ugly, but if it causes USC to clean up its program, rehabilitate its image, and create an environment in which the pond scum acting as agents or managers who precipitated this whole mess are kept away from the athletic department, then it’s worth it.

Second, Lane Kiffin is the new football coach at USC. He’s replacing Pete Carroll, who skedaddled to Seattle where he can watch the fallout from afar and make inappropriate remarks about it. Think of him as the Tony Hayward of football.

No one really knows if Kiffin can coach. He was 5-15 in one-plus seasons as coach with the Oakland Raiders. He was 7-6 in one campaign at Tennessee. He may be a superb young candidate who will eventually join the pantheon of Nick Saban, Urban Meyer and Mack Brown. He may be just the fair-haired boy of the moment who advances in his career on pedigree and killer interviews. No one really knows yet.

As livid as he may be now, he’ll look back on these penalties and realize it was a blessing. He’ll get a two-year pass, a two-year grace period. He’s coaching at arguably the highest-profile college football program in the nation — sorry, Notre Dame, but this isn’t the 1930s anymore — and there is not only the inherent pressure to win immediately in such a situation, but the added burden of following Carroll.

USC is absolutely, positively not a place to learn on the job, yet Kiffin is getting that opportunity.

Third, the two-year bowl ban isn’t exactly a champagne-popping moment, but again, it isn’t nearly as brutal as it sounds. Last year the Trojans made the Emerald Bowl. USC should be sending flowers to the NCAA for avoiding that fate again.

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But what last year’s Emerald Bowl finish indicated is that USC is a program in transition anyway. There’s no guarantee the Trojans would make a BCS bowl after the 2010 season. They have a highly gifted but still unproven quarterback in Matt Barkley, they lack depth on their offensive line, they are shallow at linebacker, and their defensive linemen — although they supposedly had a tremendous spring — still have to show they’re not the inanimate objects they appeared to be against Stanford and Oregon last season.

This leads to recruiting, and the cry that the Trojans will suffer massively because of the NCAA sanctions.

The incoming freshmen who will miss out on the first year of the bowl ban, after this upcoming 2010 season (assuming the ban is imposed immediately and there is no delay because of an appeals process), are already in the fold and signed to letters of intent. They’re probably not that concerned about a bowl. They’re more focused on getting settled in dorms and classes and competing for playing time.