USC dismissed defensive coordinator Clancy Pendergast and special teams coordinator John Baxter on Saturday, head coach Clay Helton announced in a statement. The move came the day after USC’s season ended with a 49-24 loss to Iowa in the Holiday Bowl.
Pendergast also served as assistant to the head coach, while Baxter was also the tight ends coach.
“I want to thank Coach Pendergast and Coach Baxter for their dedicated service and efforts,” Helton said in the statement. “However, in evaluating our team’s performance this year and after consulting with [athletic director] Mike Bohn, it is evident that these changes are necessary.
“Although we did fight through adversity all season and we showed improvement over the previous year, my coaching staff and I fell short of fielding a championship team. We are taking immediate steps to improve our competitiveness and meet the winning expectations of our student-athletes and fans.”
The USC defense finished 2019 ranked 77th in the FBS in total yardage and 78th in points allowed per game. The special teams, meanwhile, was ranked dead last among 130 teams in kickoff return coverage.
Both of these problems were evident in Friday’s loss to Iowa. The defense was gashed repeatedly on the edge, an area where the Trojans had struggled throughout the regular season but did not make any progress in the three weeks of practice leading up to the bowl.
And the kickoff return unit gave up a 98-yard touchdown in the second quarter.
Pendergast did not speak with the media following the game. Baxter took the blame for the return TD while also saying he felt he was the right man to fix the special teams.
“As a coach, it always starts with you,” Baxter said. “When the personnel starts to bleed off and there’s inconsistencies in personnel, we never really had the same lineup a couple games in a row. … Bottom line, that should not happen with that kind of regularity. It’s not good.”
Pendergast arrived for his third tenure at USC in 2016 after a season with the San Francisco 49ers. He was part of Helton’s original coaching staff after Helton became the full-time head coach in 2015.
There was initial improvement under Pendergast, with USC finishing 36th in the nation with 367.2 yards per game in his first season.
But the Trojans never finished above 60th in the next three seasons.
Baxter was also hired by Helton prior to the 2016 season after he spent a year as Michigan’s special teams coordinator.
The Trojans finished 2019 with an 8-5 record following the bowl loss. After the regular-season finale win over UCLA, there were questions about whether Helton would return for a fifth season as head coach, just as there had been following a 5-7 performance in 2018.
But for the second year in a row, this time with a new athletic director and after an 11-day waiting period, USC announced Helton would return. In his two-tweet statement at the time, Bohn, hired in November from Cincinnati, spoke of “tough decisions necessary to compete at a championship level.”
And for the second year in a row, that has meant a major shakeup in USC’s coaching staff. Last year, it was offensive coordinator Tee Martin who was fired. So now in the span of 13 months, Helton has parted ways with all three of his coordinators from the start of the 2018 season.
The firings of Pendergast and Baxter marked the second and third changes to the USC coaching staff on Saturday. Outside linebackers coach Joe DeForest was hired by North Carolina State to coach its safeties.
