According to a report on ESPN, Kevin O'Neill has been hired as the new head basketball coach at the University of Southern California. USC had been without a head coach since Tim Floyd resigned under fire a few weeks ago. Allegedly, Floyd paid someone $1,000 to convince highly-touted recruit O.J. Mayo to attend USC. In the wake of Floyd's departure, there is a bit of a mess to be cleaned up for Trojan basketball, and that's the task at hand for new coach O'Neill. Much of the roster who inexplicably made a Sweet 16 run last season is gone, as are three solid recruits Floyd had previously signed. O'Neill will try to pick up the pieces with Dwight Lewis and Leonard Washington as the leaders of his team -- assuming he can convince them to stay aboard.
O'Neill has a good amount of experience in coaching, it's just that he hasn't always been incredibly successful. He went 86-62 in four seasons at Marquette, 36-47 in three seasons at Tennessee and 30-56 in three seasons at Northwestern. The black mark on O'Neill's record for those stops is that the schools have put together much better teams after he left. He also filled in for Lute Olsen at Arizona for 2008 -- going 19-15 with a losing conference record. That just doesn't cut it in Tucson.
This might sound like a bad hiring, but the reality of the situation was USC probably didn't have many better options. The team is currently in shambles and the university could be facing sanctions from the NCAA. This isn't an Indiana-level program -- who hired Tom Crean when staring down a much worse situation -- and it's predominantly known as a football school. Plus, they have to compete in-city with one of the elite programs in the nation: UCLA.
O'Neill could have been the best the Trojans could salvage. Time will tell if this marriage will be a successful one, but it appears USC feels comfortable giving the keys to their program to a guy who has tons of experience in coaching basketball, regardless of his past record.
