John McKay was the winningest coach in Trojan history, but he was also the stuff of legends, demanding, stubborn, creative – and never at a loss for words.
“I’ll never be hung in effigy,” John McKay used to say. “Before every season I send my men out to buy up all the rope in Los Angeles.”
That was typical John McKay – deflecting the pressure of his job as USC’s head football coach with humor. What he didn’t say, however, was that there was no reason to hang him in effigy, because he won almost all the time.
When McKay, who died in June at the age of 77, succeeded Don Clark as head coach after the 1959 season, USC hadn’t won a national championship in football for nearly 30 years.
In 1962, his third season, McKay won his first – and went on to win three more (1967, 1972, 1974). He and his teams also had three unbeaten seasons, won nine conference titles, went to eight Rose Bowls and had a 16-year won-lost record of 127-40-8, making McKay the winningest coach in Trojan football history. His record in his last 14 seasons – before he left to coach the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers – was 119-29-7.
Many people still call USC’s 1972 team the greatest in college football history. The Trojans went 12-0, outscored their opponents, 467-134, and never trailed in the second half.
As a coach, McKay was demanding, decisive, stubborn in his beliefs, and creative. As the inventor of the modern I-formation, he was a firm believer in the running game and was the first coach to prove that great running backs could carry the ball 25, 30 or 35 times a game.
Some observers were appalled. “Isn’t there anything you can do besides run the tailback?” they asked. “Why is he carrying the ball so much?”
McKay’s answer has become a part of football lore.
“Why not?” he said. “The ball isn’t very heavy. And besides, he doesn’t belong to a union.”


McKay had five outstanding tailbacks – in order, Mike Garrett, O.J. Simpson, Clarence Davis, Anthony Davis and Ricky Bell. All were first-team All-Americans. Garrett and Simpson were also USC’s first two Heisman Trophy winners. Anthony Davis was a runner-up for the award. Bell finished third and second.
McKay’s teams also played consistently good defense – “I’ve never drawn a new play without drawing a defense to stop it,” he said once – and, like so many great defenses in football, they were built on speed. When no one could stop the Wishbone attack in the early 1970s, McKay and his teams stopped it.
More than 25 years after playing for McKay, former USC quarterback Pat Haden is still awed by another of McKay’s abilities.
“I think he was the best evaluator of talent I’ve ever seen,” Haden says. “He would recruit some freshman who was an All-American linebacker in high school, and the first day he would watch him practice and say, ‘You’re a tight end.’ Two years later, that kid was an All-American tight end. He had a great knack for putting a team together.”
He also had a great knack for getting your attention.
“He had absolute charisma,” Garrett, now USC’s athletic director, says. “His personality dominated a room. He was also a brilliant man. People underestimated how brilliant he was.”

Photographs courtesy of USC sports information?

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