He Chooses Freedom by Keeping This Job

Pete Carroll? Two words. NFL guy.

During most of his career in this town, no matter how much he protested, that is how I defined him.

Pete Carroll? Short timer. Quick fixer. Temporary Trojan.

He agreed to coach USC only because he was out of work and needed a path back to the pros. He had been fired there twice. He required a return for redemption.

It was as plain as that perpetually sly grin on his face. USC was not his slow road into the sunset, it was his carpool lane to Sundays.

I was so certain of this that I wrote about it, argued about it, and, during one memorable New Year’s Eve party in Miami before the Orange Bowl three years ago, I was even loudly heckled about it by a certain former USC cheerleader named Barney Rosenzweig.

Fast-forward to Wednesday night, the shadows darkening Howard Jones Field, players lazily pedaling their bikes along nearby campus streets, the shouts of playing children in the distance, the coach picking bits of grass off his khakis and beaming.

Pete Carroll? Two words. Contract extension.

He’s here, he’s staying, and that’s huge.

“There’s no question, this just fits,� he said.

For the first time, I believed him.

If football’s hottest coaching property was ever going to leave for the NFL riches, it would be now.

The heart of a national championship team is leaving him. His winning streak is eventually coming to an end. His work here is only going to get harder.

He could make millions by running the Houston Texans. Heck, he might even get to keep coaching Reggie Bush in the process. If he could ever leave town with sympathetic handshakes instead of hard feelings, it would be next month.

Instead, after most of the media had departed Wednesday’s practice, he cut through the early-evening quiet by dropping the news that he had reached an agreement Wednesday on an extended contract that should keep him here for at least another four years.

Here, where he has the one thing that the NFL cannot give him -- total control.

“A guy doesn’t want to do something that an owner might later change,� Carroll said. “There’s no interference here. You have a chance to be who you are. I have all the freedom I could ever dream of.�

Here, in a collegiate environment he says he enjoys even more than the idea of eventually running a new NFL franchise.

“It’s a logical thing for people to think,� he said of his speculated interest in a new Los Angeles pro team. “But those same people also say that the NFL is the end. And it’s not. Matt Leinart showed that this year.�

Here, where his smile works, and his energy sells, and his young players buy and buy and buy.

Everything about Carroll’s style that failed in the NFL succeeds here, and he is smart enough to realize that.

“I just don’t see any alternatives,� Carroll said.

This doesn’t mean he won’t get itchy and leave in a few years to run the Los Angeles Saints. But he said that he hoped to be around for at least the career span of this winter’s recruits -- “I’m planning on it,� he said -- meaning five more years.

Even though every coach talks like that, Carroll has never talked specifically like that, and now we have his word on it.

The timing of Wednesday’s announcement, coming one week before the annual mass NFL firings, was intentional, a clear preemptive strike against opposing recruiters who would use the pros as ammunition against him.

But, after five years, it finally sounds like more than spin.

“I love being here,� Carroll said. “I love being in this whole energy level of sports. It’s awesome.�

And, he’s right, it fits him.

Where else could a coach, by sheer energy, create a culture where the defending Heisman Trophy shares a media guide cover with a teammate, and then supports that teammate as he steals that trophy for himself, leading to another unbeaten season?

The melding of Leinart and Bush might never have happened in the NFL, but Carroll could pull it off here.

And where else could a coach endure the departure of the heart of his coaching staff and still end up with a better year?

Compellingly, in losing Norm Chow and Ed Orgeron and Tim Davis, Carroll seemed to find the best parts of himself.

He’s sometimes too silly, sometimes too stubborn and occasionally too lenient. He runs a program atop a tightrope stretched so tautly between hard work and fun that one has the feeling that a huge tumble could be only moments away.

“After five years here, I hope we have shown there is a way to have great discipline and intensity and still enjoy every minute of it,� Carroll said. “It’s hard for people to understand, but that’s what we do.�

And, although it may have been once hard for certain fools to understand, that’s what he wants to keep doing.

In this move-it-or-lose-it sports society, who would have thought that college football’s best coach would be happy simply being college football’s best coach?

USC football? Two words. Pete Carroll.

Bill Plaschke can be reached at [email protected]. To read previous columns by Plaschke, go to latimes.com/plaschke.