A jarring scene unfolded on USC’s football practice field last spring.
Into the fray of 300-pound defensive tackles and sculpted linebackers stepped a coach who might have seemed more likely to pull out an AARP card than knock a college kid onto his rear.
One forceful blow later, there was no questioning the vitality of the Trojans’ new defensive coordinator.
Gary Patterson still had it after all these years.
Said linebacker Desman Stephens II: “I don’t know how old he is, but he’s out there like he’s 30.”
Said new safeties coach Paul Gonzales: “For a 60-year-old guy, he’s still got some power.”
Sixty? Try 66, the birthday Patterson celebrated in February.
Maybe age really is just a number.
In addition to Patterson’s strength, the Baby Boomer also owns plenty of stamina, if his daily schedule is any indication.
After telling reporters upon his arrival in January that he had been going from 7 in the morning until around 8 at night, that ended up qualifying as a light workday.
Now those days can last from 16 to 20 hours.
When he met with reporters on Monday morning inside Heritage Hall, the man hailed as the father of the 4-2-5 defense had just compiled a list of corrections needed from a previous practice. Up next was the practice plan for Tuesday.
It’s all part of a schedule that’s unforgiving by design.
“You want to change things,” Patterson said, “it’s a full-time job. It’s not one of those things that you do 70 or 80% of your time.”
USC’s Gary Patterson ready to make a difference
Patterson is here because USC’s defense has been the one thing that’s always needed fixing under coach Lincoln Riley. While some significant strides were made the last two seasons under former defensive coordinator D’Anton Lynn, the Trojans haven’t had an elite defense since Riley’s arrival before the 2022 season.
Not coincidentally, they’ve also failed to make the College Football Playoff.
The hope is that Patterson can change that after a five-year hiatus from full-time coaching, though he served as special assistant at Texas for one season and as an advisor at Baylor following his departure from TCU in 2021.
Working on an Amazon football show provided the recent inductee into the College Football Hall of Fame with a subscription service that allowed him to watch football from across the country for free. He studied the schemes of Indiana and Ohio State, which produced the top two red zone defenses in the country over the last two years.
Now he’s trying to forge a winning blend with a defensive roster that’s heavy on freshmen and redshirt freshmen.
“Everything,” Patterson said, “was about growing up, it wasn’t about where we started.”
Following his old pattern of installing the defense in just six days allowed more time for mastery and fine-tuning. He’s placed white stripes on the top of players’ helmets to help coaches more easily track proper eye movement. Among the early mantras he’s instilled are to train as hard as you can during the week so that Saturdays are easy.
No longer worrying about recruiting and fundraising – the bane of every head coach’s existence – has allowed Patterson to marinate in football. That’s just the way he wants it.
“You sit there and you grade,” Patterson said, “and you [determine] how do you move people around so you get the best group of guys you can have on the field?”
With only five starters returning, this is a defense in flux. Patterson has suggested that the team’s surplus of quality big bodies might make using a jumbo package of five defensive linemen preferable, particularly when it comes to stopping the run.
“The less you have to add secondary players to stop the run,” Patterson said, “the less chance you have of giving up big plays.”
Still, questions abound. Is his scheme outdated? Has the game passed him by? Can he connect with teenagers?
Patterson said his age and experience – his coaching career goes all the way back to a graduate assistant job at Kansas State in 1982 – are nothing but a plus.
“There’s not a lot of guys in this profession of the age that you can gather and go back to things that I’ve learned through all the years,” he said. “That’s what I try to do for coach Riley if he needs me, if he has questions, [tell him], ‘Here’s what I’ve seen before, and here’s what’s happening.’ ”
What’s happening is that a group of players less than a third of Patterson’s age is thrilled to be learning from a master of his craft.
While it’s too early to know if it will lead to the desired payoff, the Trojans at least know they have a winning blueprint.
“If you want it done right,” Stephens said, “he’s going to show you the exact way how to do it, so he’s not one of those coaches that just says, ‘All right, go do this’ – he actually shows you what to do.”
If it happens to involve knocking you back several feet, all the better.
