LOS ANGELES – Lynn Swann is midway through Year 1 on the job at USC.

Swann, an alumnus and a Pro Football Hall of Fame member as a wide receiver for the Pittsburgh Steelers, replaced Pat Haden as the Trojans’ athletic director last year. He took over the post in July.

It is the first time Swann, 64, has worked in college athletics.

In his second-floor office at Heritage Hall, Swann met with the Southern California News Group to discuss the state of his department, the transition, his approach to the job, the football team’s in-season turnaround, the expectations for next season and more.

Below is a transcript of the conversation. It has been edited for length.

Question: What has the transition into working in college sports for the first time been like for you?

Swann: It’s been good for me, and the folks here in the department are happy with what we’re doing and what’s going on. No big surprises. No big changes. No big turnarounds to any degree other than going from 1-3 to 9-3 in the football season. That’s about the biggest turnaround we’ve had in the last six months.

Q: It seems your approach has been to not come in and knock everyone around, but to learn from everybody. Is that a fair read?

Swann: That’s one part of it. I don’t think there were major problems with this athletic department. The previous athletic director, Pat, had some health issues and was the deciding factor with him stepping down, although he’s still doing some work for us on the Coliseum project. So, there wasn’t as if you stepped into a difficult situation. … No need really to come in and say you’re going to clean house. That would be kind of a waste. You lose your institutional knowledge from all the years people have been here. You lose the bridges and all the relationships people have from our development people with our alumni base. So, really, I’m the new guy on the job learning from them, looking to see how things are structured, looking to see if I’m going to want to do some of these things a little differently. But that’s it.

Q: Is Pat Haden someone you talk to much?

Swann: Not on a regular basis, because (senior associate athletic director and chief operations officer) Steve (Lopes) is here, and Steve can give me very much the same kind of information of what’s going on. I feel very comfortable if there’s something I want to know, I can pick up the phone and call Pat.

Q: Do you have a particular vision for how USC looks going forward?

Swann: You have to be careful about those kind of things. … I think it would be a huge mistake to come in and say, ‘I have this huge vision for USC,’ on top of a $270 million retrofit of the Coliseum. And so you go after all these kind of things, and I think you overload your plate and you overload the people who are willing to help you. They feel encumbered by so many asks. So I think you have to be careful about a new vision, if you will.

Q: The football season ended pretty well with a Rose Bowl win. Do you see the year as a success? How do you evaluate it and put it all together?

Swann: I look at the year being a success. I look at it as a very good job by (Coach) Clay Helton, keeping his team together and keeping them focused. It probably would have been easy for a number of players to give up on the season. ‘Oh, we’re at USC, and we started 1-3. That’s not very good.’ He didn’t let that happen. And he was not discouraged by any negativity from any particular corner of the USC market or the L.A. area. And we put ourselves in a position to go to a bowl game. As luck would have it, we ended up in the Rose Bowl. But Clay and I are both disappointed that we ended up in the Rose Bowl not as Pac-12 champions. So we could have just as easily been in the Alamo Bowl as the Rose Bowl because of factors that we could not control (by virtue of being ranked ahead of Colorado in the College Football Playoff rankings, USC earned an at-large berth to the Rose Bowl). So at the end of the day, we want to control our destiny. We want to be that team that’s undefeated at the end of the year. We want to be that team that is playing for the Pac-12 championship and winning it. So the very least we’re looking at is going to the Rose Bowl to play. If we’re not playing in the Rose Bowl because they have a (College Football Playoff) semifinal game and we’re not in that game, then we’ll be playing in a New Year’s Day bowl game some other place. But the idea is to first win the Pac-12 championship, and that should be your stepping stone to winning a national championship.

Q: When the team was 1-3, there was a lot of chatter about Clay’s job and a lot of general frustration. What were you hearing from fans and people around here?

Swann: You hear the chatter, but as I told Clay, he has my confidence. I trust that he will do the right things for this football team. I think it would be very impatient to come in and say, ‘OK, if he doesn’t get off to a good start, I’m going to fire him.’ That’s pre-determining what you’re going to do without looking at the circumstances. Just think how silly it would’ve been for me to come out when we were 1-3, make a public statement and say I’m not happy. Of course I’m not happy. No one would be happy with 1-3. And then say, ‘I’m thinking about making a change.’ Well jeez. What coach will want to coach for you then? He’s 1-3, and you’re telling the world that you’re going to make a change. What do you do to the players? The players are going to say, ‘What? You’re going to take out the head coach? Should I stay here? What should I do?’ I believe I have a great deal of patience. I’ve seen years with the Steelers. They’ve been a very good organization. They’ve had three coaches since the mid-’60s, and all three have won Super Bowls and all three have been competitive for the majority of the time that they were coaching. Every time you change a coach, it’s like getting a new franchise. You start from the ground up. So you want to create stability. I didn’t come in here looking to fire a coach after the first year, especially when the coach hadn’t had a chance to actually prove himself. So, patience. Not setting yourself up for failure, not walking out onto the plank when it’s not necessary, these are things I try not to do.

Q: Clay has said you guys talk fairly frequently, including after every game …

Swann: Yeah, we talk at least twice a week if not more. We have a scheduled meeting every week, where we go over players’ performance, his coaches. We’re talking about injuries, a variety of things, academics. We go over all those things. Then I’ll see him in the morning when he’s working out, when I’m working out (at the John McKay Center). You stop and casually talk about a few other things, questions that pop up. So I think we both believe, and certainly I believe, that communication is critical and we have to communicate. We don’t always have to agree, but we have to communicate well.

Q: What did you see, being up close, how they turned things around?

Swann: Well, it’s consistency. I think that Clay felt like he had a good program, a good handle on what he wanted to get done and how he wanted to get it done. So it wasn’t a matter of, all of a sudden it didn’t work after four games so now they’re making big changes. He stuck with it, and it served him well. So it’s a check mark in the right column.

Q: What are your expectations for next year? Some people have talked about this team being a top-five team. Do you see them being in the mix for the playoffs?

Swann: I think our fans are great. They’re very loyal. They’re very passionate. They want to win. They want to be on top. They want to win the national championship. But usually fans are in a hurry for things to happen. It can’t happen soon enough. And it can’t happen fast enough, and they want you to dominate. They want you to win every game 60-10 or 60-6, whatever it might be. They just want you to win and win big. And, again, I like to believe that I have the patience for this job and understand what it takes to win. I think we might be a little further away from that. We may be fortunate to be in the hunt or close to it, but you have to have a little luck and some good fortune. Everything has to fall in place. If it does, maybe, possibly. But I look for us to actually make a move a little after that. I’m not looking for us to make huge leaps in 2017, but if it happens, we’ll take it. I think we can do it in 2018. Get closer to it. You’re looking for that kind of progress.

Q: In what areas do you think they’re further away than people think?

Swann: That’s kind of Clay’s purview in terms of how he wants to coach the team and how he wants to develop it. But look at a team like Clemson. Clemson has done a very good job of rebuilding its football program and being competitive. But how long did it take for Dabo Swinney to do that? You start looking at the fact they win a couple big games, but the season wasn’t that remarkable. Then the next year, remarkable season, they don’t win the big games and they come close, and he’s still recruiting. I can’t recall exactly how many years Dabo has been there (hired as the permanent coach with the 2009 season). So now you’re looking at it. Now it’s six years, seven years into the program. Last year they played for a national title and didn’t win. But he had the depth and the quality in his team, and they were able to get back for another shot at it. And they won it, but they won it the same way they lost it. Last second. Touchdown. They score – as opposed to Alabama scoring. They walk away with a national championship. That doesn’t come overnight. That kind of consistency doesn’t come overnight.

Q: This was the second season where the football team could carry 85 scholarships. Is there an effect still from the sanctions?

Swann: It takes awhile to get back up to strength. We don’t certainly have the depth we’d like to have. Is it a result of the sanctions? Sure. It’s hard to keep the same depth.

Q: Had there been an eight-team playoff, USC might have made the field last season. Do you have an opinion on expanding the playoff?

Swann: I think expansion would be difficult. As I sit here today, going into my seventh month on the job, I would tell you I would not be in favor of expansion. People have been talking about this all the time. I worked at ABC when we had the No. 1 versus No. 2 team (the Bowl Championship Series). I did the first four of those games. Everybody talked about, well, there are two other teams that should be in the mix. Now there’s four teams. Now people talk about that there are four or five other teams that should be in the mix. OK. The NCAA basketball tournament has 64 teams. Then there are a couple wild-card teams they threw out there. OK? … No matter what you do, whether it’s two, or four, or eight, whatever number you get to, people are always going to think there should be two, four, eight more.

Q: How was having the Rams as a tenant at the Coliseum this year?

Swann: Not a problem. I was over there for one of the Rams games, just briefly on the sideline. But when I was a student here, the Rams, UCLA and USC all played at the Coliseum, so there were three football teams. Two college, one pro. Now we have one pro team and one college team. There seems to be no stress.

Q: Early in the football season, you had two players, Osa Masina and Don Hill, who were under sexual-assault investigations. It took about two weeks until they were indefinitely suspended (Masina and Hill were first suspended for the first two games, but allowed to practice in the interim). How do you think that was handled?

Swann: You have a process and you have due process for the student-athletes. You have Title IX issues. It’s spelled out in terms of what should be done and how it should be done. So I think, for the most part, for all parties, we followed the process.

Q: Let’s talk about USC men’s basketball. USC basketball has a little different history than USC football. It doesn’t have national championship banners lying around. What are the expectations?

Swann: I don’t think the expectation changes. Just because you haven’t won doesn’t mean you’re not working toward winning a national championship. Our women’s soccer team won one national championship in the past and (Coach) Keidane (McAlpine) worked this team, built this team and won a national championship last fall. So that’s the expectation for everyone. Recruit athletes to come in, compete and win. Basketball is no different. We haven’t done it, but I think Andy (Enfield) is a good coach, got them into the playoffs last year. Everyone around the program seems to believe he’s making strides, doing the right thing. This year his team was going into the Christmas break undefeated. First time in his life he’s ever had an undefeated team after Christmas. So he’s making strides. He’s moving it along.

Q: They have a pretty good product, where they’re fast, they’re able to score points, they share the ball, but most games are still half capacity (average attendance at the 10,258-seat Galen Center is 4,198 through 13 games). Has that surprised you? Are you dismayed by that at all?

Swann: It doesn’t surprise me after finding out from folks here this is kind of where we are relative to the crowds. Our marketing department and everybody is trying to find ways to engage students, for students to be here, to engage alumni to be here. They get fired up for some big games. We’ll continue to work on it. Try to get more people.

Contact the writer: jkaufman@scng.com

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