Steve Sarkisian Coached Through the Pain Because Football Said So

An employee with a disability was terminated secondhand while on his way to a rehabilitation facility, and his employer has since refused to pay him a dime of what was remaining on his contract.

You can see why, then, Steve Sarkisian is suing USC for the remaining $12.6 million on his contract plus undisclosed additional fees. (TMZ, which broke the story, alleges a total in the neighborhood of $30 million.) The lawsuit, which can be accessed online courtesy of The Los Angeles Times, encompasses 14 separate complaints, including discrimination on the basis of disability, breach of contract and wrongful termination. Within those complaints, Sarkisian finally gives his version of the events that led to his firing. Unsurprisingly, athletic director Pat Haden is painted as something of a callous maniac.

It's in both parties' best interest that this never gets to open court: Sarkisian can then leave with at least some of what he's owed, and USC can finally extinguish the last embers of his tumultuous coaching tenure. The case will join Billy Gillispie's wrongful termination suit against Kentucky and West Virginia's suit against Rich Rodriguez and the University of Michigan over an unpaid buyout clause as notable cases involving a major college program getting in a pitched legal battle with a former coach. Beyond that, it will probably be forgotten.

It's easy to see why all involved would want to forget it, but there's something worth remembering in this mess. More than anything else, the Sarkisian lawsuit is a significant reminder of how the bedrock football tenet of playing through pain can cripple coaches as well as players.

Sarkisian wasn't in physical pain, of course. He is, by his own admission, an alcoholic, and was also depressed and anxious. These are mental and emotional pains—alcoholism, by virtually every medical and legal standard, is recognized and protected as a disease. USC claims it did not know Sarkisian was an alcoholic, a statement that may well be true and which, conveniently, is also exactly the sort of thing it should say to protect itself legally.

No one denies that treatment protocols were indeed enacted following Sarkisian's apparently intoxicated appearance in August at the team's Salute to Troy event. However, the complaint reveals the approach USC took to be inept, indifferent, ignorant, or parts of all three.

Robin Scholefield, whom Haden appointed as Sarkisian's counselor, is a sports psychologist—neither a medical doctor nor an expert in addiction. According to the complaint, she willingly or negligently disclosed Sarkisian's medical information without his consent to USC administrators, an act which could be defensible legally—the University of Oregon was allowed to do something similar—but had far more potential to damage him further than aid his recovery. The extent of Sarkisian's therapy was a once-per-week, hour-long session conducted in his office. Occasionally, he would see a USC psychiatrist to refill two prescriptions the doctor had been prescribed him for anxiety and depression. Sarkisian felt the medications "[made] him feel and act abnormally and were not stopping his drinking." Later, when he entered an inpatient facility, a place with no purpose apart from treating his alcoholism, "he was almost immediately taken off all the medications that a USC doctor had recommended and prescribed."

There's more, too; should one choose to believe Sarkisian's account of his final day as USC's head coach, Robin Scholefield's response to his plea for inpatient care was to recommend "doubling the dosage of Mr. Sarkisian's medications, having him consult more often with USC's clinical psychologist, and maybe take a few days off."

USC's version of this story is likely very different, and it bears mentioning that, at least regarding other events of that day, Sarkisian's explanation contradicts USC and the media's version of events. Then again, it is also probably worth remembering that the last time a USC doctor was in the news, it was for breaking FDA and NCAA regulations by shooting Armond Armstead, a former Trojan defensive lineman, up with Toradol and not informing him of the risks.

Sarkisian is more like Armstead than you might think. Both are victims of football's blurry distinction between 'hurt' and 'injured.' Only the latter is grounds for the 'out' designation on the weekly injury report, and there's a reason why there are three separate statuses for hurt players—probable, questionable, doubtful—that come before it. This is a high-revenue sport that has long fetishized its participants as gladiators. Football players, in other words, are expected to compete so long as they can approximate a basic level of function. This is the way it's always been, and many players do it with smiles on their faces. It's how the game taught them to be.

While they may not have known how deep Sarkisian's problems ran, there is no way Haden and USC could have believed him to be healthy in the traditional sense. After all, they were the ones who made Sark sign a clause promising to avoid alcohol-related incidents, take medication and see a therapist. No matter how cursory or ineffective those measures ultimately proved to be, their very implementation is evidence that USC knew Sarkisian wasn't right. But he could certainly function. Prescribe him the right pills, give him a small space to vent his feelings, and Steve Sarkisian could still perform his duties as head coach, regardless of what remained unresolved beneath the surface. The Trojans looked creaky, but they won three more games with him at the helm. Even diminished, Sarkisian was doing less damage this way than he would have been had the Trojan administration opted for an alternative. It is easy to see the Trojan brass' reasoning, here: extended time off could prompt instability, damage recruiting, and invite a fresh helping scrutiny on a PR-battered athletic department. As it turned out, those things happened when they fired him, anyway.

In the end, the rehabilitation program in which Sarkisian is now enrolled—and, he says, finally clean and sober—operates exactly the opposite of how USC handled him. This is not a good look for Troy. Of course, it's likely that Sarkisian exacerbated the matter himself. USC noted in its response to Sarkisian's lawsuit that the coach "repeatedly denied to university officials that he had a problem with alcohol, never asked for time off to get help, and resisted university efforts to provide him with help." That could be an alcoholic denying his condition, but it also reeks of a football man insistent on gritting his teeth and performing through weakness. The bite-sized therapy sessions might have been piecemeal because Sarkisian flashed his amiable grin and insisted he felt great. His mind could still withstand the marathon workweeks and his eyes could still watch film. He could certainly function.

Addicts lie, to themselves and others, and so do football players if it means getting into a game. Less than a month after Sarkisian was fired, USC star wide receiver Juju Smith-Schuster played in excruciating pain against Arizona five days after having surgery on his right hand; by his own admission, he stayed on the field in part because he convinced Clay Helton, Sarkisian's replacement, that he felt fine.

Steve Sarkisian is an alcoholic, and he was once a football player. His bosses at USC, meanwhile, are in the football business. Everyone involved had an incentive to pretend everything was fine, for their own sake and for each other's. Football demanded as much, and they complied. This lawsuit serves as a reminder of how corrosive football culture—gladiatorial and lucrative and macho and blinkered as it is—can be. This will not be a teachable moment. The game hasn't changed, no matter how many safety protocols have been put into place.

It hasn't even changed at USC. After Smith-Schuster's performance against Arizona, Helton, now officially the Trojans' head coach, praised Smith-Schuster for the way he "commit[ed] himself to his team." He called him a warrior.