- Georgia Southern will travel to play USC in Week 2 of the college football season.
- The Eagles’ head coach, Clay Helton, formerly coached the Trojans.
- Despite a career winning record at USC, the Trojans fired Helton partway through the 2021 season.
This weekend, Clay Helton will be in a familiar position, roaming the sidelines of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum under the warm Southern California sun on a Saturday afternoon.
This time, though, he’ll be standing on the opposite end of the field.
Helton will be taking on the USC football program that he led for the better part of a decade when he brings his Georgia Southern team out to the West Coast for a matchup against the Trojans on Saturday, Sept. 6 during Week 2 of the 2025 college football season.
Though he’s in his fourth season piloting the Eagles, Helton is still primarily known as the former USC head coach, having gone 46-24 over eight seasons. Now, he’ll get the opportunity to coach against — and, if things break right, beat — the school that fired him in 2021.
Before Saturday’s game kicks off, here’s a closer look at Helton’s USC tenure and why he was fired:
Why was Clay Helton fired at USC?
Helton was an unconventional choice to lead one of college football’s most prestigious entities: a first-time head coach tasked with shepherding a program that had won two national championships in the 15 years before he was hired.
Due to a unique, unpredictable set of circumstances, he found himself in one of the most coveted roles in the sport.
In 2015, Helton, then the Trojans’ offensive coordinator, was promoted to interim head coach five games into the season after Steve Sarkisian was placed on leave and ultimately fired after a series of alcohol-related incidents. After a 3-2 start under Sarkisian, USC won five of its first seven games under Helton. After the fifth of those wins, and ahead of the Trojans’ appearance in the Pac-12 championship game, Helton shed the interim label and was named the permanent head coach.
His tenure got off to a strong start, with USC going 21-6 in his first two seasons and making appearances in the Rose Bowl and Cotton Bowl, the former of which they won in a 52-49 classic against Penn State at the end of the 2016 season.
After losing several key players from those teams — namely, quarterback Sam Darnold — the program’s fortunes slid. Starting with a 5-7 mark in 2018, their first sub-.500 season since 2000, the Trojans went 18-13 over a three-season stretch from 2018-20. Though that run was punctuated with a 5-1 mark in the COVID-19-shortened 2020 season, pressure on Helton was mounting, particularly as USC invested more financially into the program and a new athletic director, Mike Bohn, had taken over.
The metaphorical axe fell on him quickly. On Sept. 13, 2021, two days after the Trojans’ 42-28 loss to Stanford in their second game of the season, Helton was fired.
When addressing the move, Bohn cited the increased commitment the university had put into the football program and the lack of on-field results that followed it under Helton’s watch.
“During the past two offseasons, we provided every resource necessary for our football program to compete for championships,” Bohn said in a statement. “The added resources carried significantly increased expectations for our team’s performance, and it is already evident that, despite the enhancements, those expectations would not be met without a change in leadership.”
The split wasn’t acrimonious. In announcing his decision, Bohn described Helton as “a tremendous role model and mentor” to his players and “one of the finest human beings I have met in this industry.” Helton, while speaking to The Athletic ahead of his first season at Georgia Southern in 2022, said his time as an assistant coach and head coach at USC were “the 12 most wonderful years of any football coach’s life.”
After dismissing Helton, Bohn said that USC would “actively and patiently pursue a coach who will deliver on the championship aspirations and expectations we all share for our football program.” Fewer than three months later, the Trojans surprised much of the college football world when they hired Lincoln Riley away from Oklahoma.
Clay Helton USC record
Over parts of eight seasons as USC’s head coach, Helton’s teams went 46-24. That period includes a one-game stint as the Trojans’ interim coach at the end of the 2013 season, as well as his run as the interim head coach in 2015, before he earned the full-time gig.
One game into his fourth season at Georgia Southern, he is 20-20. Last season the Eagles went 8-5, their best mark under Helton. They lost 42-14 in their 2025 season opener against Fresno State on Saturday, Aug. 30.
Interestingly, Riley, Helton’s successor at USC, is 27-14 so far with the Trojans, one game worse than Helton was 41 games into his tenure.
