“He is the antithesis of Pete Carroll in my opinion,” Olmedo says, almost proudly. However, USC fans who want to be inspired by a familiar type of energy from their coach may watch the same clips and find themselves unmoved. These days, Olmedo will watch Aranda’s Baylor news conferences, marveling at all the coherent thoughts making it from brain to microphone. “He didn’t say boo,” Olmedo says, delivering a familiar refrain among Aranda’s mentors. The guy was drier than the Redlands summer heat. Looking back, Olmedo laughs thinking about Aranda the “Fencepost,” but the moniker was spot-on. He may not have started the fall as a hot candidate for the USC opening, but wins over respected programs (and coaches) Iowa State (Matt Campbell), Brigham Young (Kalani Sitake) and Texas (former USC head coach Steve Sarkisian) have turned heads suddenly to a coach who has never sought any attention for himself. 13 ahead of a Big 12 showdown today in Waco against unbeaten No. Now, in just his second year atop a Power Five program, Aranda’s Bears were 7-2 and ranked No. After that season, USC athletic director Mike Bohn tried to lure Aranda back home to lead the Trojans’ defense, but Baylor would swoop in and hire him as head coach.
Stay consistent regardless of outside pressure.”Īranda got that job at Cal Lutheran and went on to coordinate defenses from Hawaii to Utah State to Wisconsin to Louisiana State, where the school paid him $2.5 million a year and was rewarded with a magical run to the 2019 national championship. “Personal credibility - do what you say you will do. If we have a double standard for stars and backups, we will have a team that will be torn apart.” Don’t allow relationships with better players to compromise you. “The goal as coach is to protect, not destroy, the athlete’s spirit and sense of self.” “True battle in athletics has less to do with external events than with internal battles against losing enthusiasm, courage, fearlessness, and compassion.” He wanted to lead a defense - any defense.įlipping through Aranda’s treatise 17 years later, each quote presents a small window into the formation of a man’s football soul - surely informed by that philosophy degree he earned at Cal Lutheran: “Cal Lu” in Thousand Oaks would bring a precipitous drop in prestige, though, and yet Aranda was undeterred. But his alma mater, Division III California Lutheran, had an opening for a defensive coordinator, a role Aranda had been working toward for a decade. He just kept reading, listening, jotting down notes, learning the craft of football however he could, until he was back with Olmedo in 2004 at an Office Depot in Redlands, making copies of a plan for coaching defense that needed a 37-topic table of contents.Īranda had been coaching linebackers at Houston, a good job in Conference USA. Olmedo, built like a linebacker but newly retired from coaching them, grabs the binder from the shelf, and soon he is transported back to the early ’90s, when a kid nicknamed “Fencepost” because he offered so few words was somehow voted captain by his teammates.
Nobody would notice this particular fountain of knowledge if not for the label, scrawled in black Sharpie, featuring a name that grows in aura with each passing fall: Taken together, they represent an encyclopedia of football strategy compiled during Miguel Olmedo’s three decades coordinating the Redlands defense. On that bookshelf sits a thick white binder gathering dust aside dozens of others just like it. Here, inside a trailer tucked behind Redlands High, sits a bookshelf. Two months in, the hunt for clues as to who may be anointed the next USC head football coach has guided us to the unlikeliest of places, to a high school social studies classroom located 70 miles due east of downtown, where the sprawl of the Inland Empire meets the desert’s edge. LOS ANGELES > Day after day, the search stays quiet.
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