John Blanchette: He’s gone, but Holt keeps giving

Here’s a blast from the all-too-recent past that should get you all tingly for Saturday night’s Idaho-USC football game, available in our area on Faux Sports Net:

This was exhumed from a 2003 story about the annual hiring of a new Vandals football coach, and the speaker was Gary Michael, who at the time was serving as the school’s interim president and possibly was delirious that his hitch was drawing to a conclusion.

“I’m going to put this in my obituary,” Michael said, “that I’m the guy that hired Nick Holt and brought Idaho back to prominence.”

Whoa! Get me rewrite!

Hey, we’ve all said things we’d like to retract. I have a little pom-pom I waved in print for Dennis Erickson’s hiring a couple of years later that’s still stuck to the bottom of my shoe.

Besides, Michael wasn’t altogether wrong. Because it was Nick Holt who had the audacity to put USC on the schedule when he was the Idaho coach, and the guess is whatever baroque math Saturday’s game produces will be prominent, if only on SportsCenter that night.

And even then, there will be one guy who will still think it was a good idea. Nick Holt.

Of course, he’s back at USC again, coordinating the defense for the universally acclaimed No. 1 team in college football. Which means that his foxhole now is reinforced concrete and not cardboard.

Holt was on the telephone this week, recalling the circumstances that led him to arrange this mismatch – the point spread at the moment is 46, a total the Vandals didn’t reach a year ago until Week 3.

His various rationales: Idaho needs to play at least one money game a year, and USC’s spends as well as Auburn’s or West Virginia’s and the travel is more reasonable. There’s a chance to play on national television. And Southern California is a prime recruiting area for the Vandals “so it makes some sense to play in front of those kids and their folks,” he said.

I’m sure some recruiting nuances elude me, but how do you suppose Mr. Future Vandal answers when the homeboy sitting next to him checks the scoreboard and says, “You want to go play for these guys?”

Actually, take out the “for” and that was exactly the question Idaho athletic director Rob Spear asked Holt.

“Five times,” Spear said. “He kept saying, ‘This is going to be good.’ Then he left, and Dennis came in and wasn’t in favor of the game. Neither am I, really.”

And so Spear tried his best to shuffle the deck – to the point of lining up not only a replacement opponent for the Vandals, but one for USC, too. But with Nebraska and Notre Dame already on the non-conference schedule, the Trojans wanted nothing to do with Georgia.

“But they were very unwilling to let us out of the game,” he said. “Two years ago, when they played Fresno State near the end of the year and Fresno almost beat them? That game came about because USC let Temple out of a contract. And so the word came down, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ “

Aware that Idaho had tried to wriggle out of the contract, Holt was still unpersuaded.

“Whenever you can play on national television against a possible No. 1 team, there are two ways of looking at it,” he said. “You don’t want to because you don’t match up and you’re going to get your butt kicked. But kids want to play the best and I think those kids welcome that challenge, as opposed to playing a Division I-AA or Division II school. Those kids are going to be fired up to play in the Coliseum. They’ll remember it the rest of their lives.”

Yes, and when they’re telling the story years from now, they’ll laugh and say, “And we got our butts kicked.” At least I hope they can laugh. The same way I hope Idaho’s fifth-year seniors can some day laugh about playing for four different coaches. But is the point of the exercise giving them a memory or giving them a reasonable chance?

Like the man who succeeded him, Holt wasted little time in using Idaho for a launching pad before it could become an anchor. In fact, he didn’t take just one job but two – reneging on a verbal deal to become an assistant with the St. Louis Rams after his USC mentor, Pete Carroll, called with a better offer.

Both were big upgrades in money and prestige and hard to argue with, but on Tuesday Holt also noted how his oldest son was approaching high school age and “I didn’t want to move when he was in high school.”

Hmm. Maybe his calendar was broken when he took the Idaho job two years earlier and couldn’t have foreseen that.

“I had not finished what I started, and I feel bad about that,” he said. “But you can’t do anything about the timing. And you can’t look back.”

Not until you put it in your obituary.