Pete Carroll's Record at USC

Here is Carroll’s record broken down by tier of opponent. As always, first-tier opponents are teams that had a winning percentage of .750 or better, second tier were .500 to .749, third tier opponents were .250 to .499, and fourth tier opponents were .249 and below.

Carroll’s 15-5 mark against the top tier is the best of all of the coaches I’ve studied so far. If you take out his first season, it comes out to 15-3 with the losses being at Kansas State and at Washington State in 2002, and to Vince Young and Texas in the incredible 2005 BCS Championship Game.

The second tier mark of 28-7 (.800) puts him in line with or behind some other coaches like Jim Tressel (31-5, .861), Les Miles at LSU (12-2, .857), Urban Meyer at Florida (16-3, .842), Bob Stoops (36-9, .800), and Mark Richt (32-8, .800). If you take out Carroll’s first year, that 28-8 mark improves to a 27-4 (.870) record though.

Of those two third-tier losses, I know you can name one. It was of course the loss at home to 4-8 Stanford last year. The other was a road loss to 5-6 Notre Dame in 2001.

I mentioned earlier that USC has had two or fewer losses for six consecutive seasons. I don’t know how impressive that sounds to you, but you should be very impressed. As far as I can tell (and correct me if I’m wrong), only three schools have matched or surpassed that in the past 30 years.

Florida did it for six seasons in a row from 1993 to 1998. Miami, FL did it eight seasons in a row from 1985 to 1992. Florida State did it 14 seasons in a row from 1987 to 2000. That’s it and that’s all.

It should come as no surprise that those teams reside in a talent factory of a state like USC does. It’s especially impressive when you consider that FSU and Miami kept their streaks alive while playing each other in 1987-92, and Florida and FSU kept their streaks alive while playing each other every year in 1993-98.

What about other big programs, you ask? For purposes of historical comparison, I looked for seasons with two or fewer non-wins—non-wins being losses or ties. I also restricted it to the college football’s modern era: 1946 to the present.

Oklahoma had the longest such streak pre-1980, spanning 11 seasons from 1948 to 1958. The next longest was Alabama at six seasons, from 1961 to 1966. After that? No one.

Michigan, Ohio State, and Nebraska only got to five in a row. The best, Georgia, Notre Dame, Penn State and Texas, have done is four in a row. USC pre-Carroll didn’t even make it to four.

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