Texas coach Steve Sarkisian has rebuilt his life after getting fired from USC as his alcohol issues spilled into the spotlight, but he has done so without those who helped launch his football career.
The turmoil surrounding USC’s football team deepened Monday with the firing of Steve Sarkisian, a troubled coach who promised before the season he would seek professional help to determine if he had a drinking problem.Those issues traveled with him to work each morning, and the lines of what was appropriate blurred to the point players got used to their head coach drinking before practice and games.
Sark’s turnabout has been swift. But then again, imagine how slow the days must have felt when he arrived alone in Tuscaloosa, Ala., and started as an offensive analyst. John Featherstone, the school’s football coach, was the class’s teacher. “Feather” perked up when the youngest of the Sarkisian kids entered his classroom because he had watched the boy play in high school right down the road and liked what he saw.
Sarkisian was a fine high school passer but not a standout. He wanted to improve his prospects with quarterback guru Steve Clarkson, who gave Sarkisian and his dad, Seb, an honest appraisal: At 6 feet tall, he was not what scouts were looking for at the time. Sarkisian followed his football dream as far as Saskatchewan, where he quarterbacked the Canadian Football League’s Roughriders. When it ended, he came back to Torrance and began working as an uncelebrated software sales employee. He was also doing a little substitute teaching on the side.
Nearly a decade after he couldn’t cut it for USC baseball, Sarkisian was a Trojan once more, and he would pour everything he had into making it stick this time. But even as his national profile rose, along with the daily pressures, Sarkisian tried to stay connected to his past and the people who helped him along the way.
“I thought to myself, ‘Whoa, here’s somebody who is like me, who is in a very high-profile position in sports, and was being relatively commended or almost celebrated for going to do what he did,’ ” Sarkisian told ESPN.com years later. Kiffin said that job was attractive at the time because he could fly back to L.A. to see his kids more easily out of Atlanta.“Certainly I think he was going through a lot,” said Bush Hamdan, the Falcons’ quarterbacks coach at the time. “I really found him to be an authentic, genuine person who cared as much about the relationships as the football.”
Along his recovery track, quietly working as a college analyst and an NFL coordinator afforded him some personal insulation to get started. Returning to his Southern California roots and recruiting the sons of hyper-attentive parents who knew what happened at USC would require an extra level of intimacy and courage.
Craig is a mental health therapist, so he has seen a lot of people dealing with trauma. He took Sarkisian at his word and they began to build a deeper relationship while Bryce maintained his commitment to USC. The family was hesitant to engage, but Sarkisian read the situation astutely: The Trojans were not on steady ground under his successor and former assistant, Clay Helton, and he knew he had time on his side with a year until Signing Day.
Sarkisian lost his wrongful termination case against USC, but he had hit the Trojans where it counts for the first big recruiting win of his coaching rebirth. Just like at Alabama, once at Texas, Sarkisian wasted no time going after a top quarterback from Southern California, earning a commitment from Gardena Serra’s Maalik Murphy, the 10th-ranked quarterback in the 2022 class.
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