Former USC Coach Tim Floyd will not do interviews with the national media or the Los Angeles press, but he likes to talk to his hometown paper in Mississippi quite a bit. It was the Clarion-Ledger that broke the news of his resignation before USC even knew.With the former Southern Cal verbal now a Mississippi State commit, Renardo Sidney, there's more than a little bit of interest in what he has to say on what happened to Sidney and his USC commitment. Especially with the NCAA still trying to get more information from the Sidney family regarding their finances, before clearing him to play. Floyd offered some thoughts on Sidney and USC.
To summarize, Floyd says Sidney is a good kid and he knows nothing about any problems, that USC broke off the commitment from Sidney in response to a coming LA Times story not from anything they learned about Sidney, and that USC never did any actual investigations into Renardo Sidney despite the fact that crosstown rival UCLA had stopped recruiting him weeks prior to his verbal to USC.
"Our school was reacting to an article that was going to be written in the L.A. Times," Floyd said. "Given the fact that the institution was involved in an institutional control investigation, they viewed it as preventive management. They could not put their finger on anything."And neither could Floyd, he swears.
"I was probably as close to the situation as anybody in the country," Floyd said, "and if I thought the kid was receiving money from somebody or had asked for money, I would have not been a participant. But that wasn't the case."Floyd, of course, was accused of giving money on demand to a member of O.J. Mayo's entourage.
The big part of this story is not that Southern Cal panicked in response to a forthcoming story about Sidney's family and the questions surrounding their finances and the closeness of a shoe rep from Reebok to the family, and Sonny Vaccaro paying for their move from Mississippi to Los Angeles. It's that USC according to Floyd, never actually concerned itself to look into these things when they were recruiting him and received a verbal commitment from him.
USC has ongoing investigations into the O.J. Mayo matter on the basketball side and Reggie Bush on the football side. In both cases, the big issue for USC was how much did they know or want to know about the money flowing to the player and his family. Whether the school was purposefully and willfully ignoring any signs of something strange. Creating a situation with the potentially dreaded "lack of institutional control" over athletic programs and the student-athletes.
USC has maintained a defense of cluelessness. That they were just unaware of what was happening, and that if the NCAA and Pac-10 cleared the players it isn't fair to punish USC. Floyd seems to suggest that USC was willful in not looking into any potential hazards with a recruit so they can maintain deniability if it does become a problem. Floyd, himself, hardly looks particularly good since he continues to show he happily went along with this and was just as eager to know nothing about the potential barriers to getting the talent on the court.
