Mark Sanchez left USC early after only one season of play as the team's quarterback.
His coach, the ever-verbal, wear it all on your sleeve, Pete Carroll, said Sanchez was making a big mistake by turning pro, prematurely.
He needed more seasoning, more time at the helm of college football's most visible west coast team, seemingly a perennial BCS contender.
Carroll implied in a widely re-played press conference that Sanchez, despite his gifts, just wasn't ready.
Now, about seven months later, Sanchez has been named the starting quarterback for The New York Jets, as a first year rookie.
This has to make Pete Carroll and every other big school sports administrator red-hot and sweating bullets.
What is to keep a legion of other greenies from turning their backs on the programs that gave them visibility, even if it was only for a year or two?
Sanchez's contemporaries, and certainly top prospects who follow in the near future have to ask why prolong a collegiate career when you can earn a check worth millions by entering the NFL draft, especially if you are a talented quarterback?
I can just imagine what is coursing through the minds of Carroll and his colleagues. Gee, they hope and pray Sanchez falls on his face, embarrasses himself, and his team.
What they don't want is for him to come up a big winner in every department, a brash kid that bolted early, garnered the huge bucks, conquered New York City with all of its enticements, influence and spoils, a pipsqueak that proved Carroll was wrong.
This reminds me of one of my grad school professors that admonished Ph.D. students to not go forth into the world to consult, lest we "Poison the well" for already minted doctorate holders, including, you guessed it, professors such as the one that asserted we weren't ready.
Losing Sanchez, on a much grander scale, was the equivalent for USC.
With Carroll's excellent recruiting resulting in tremendous depth at the quarterback position, Sanchez's departure was a headache and very inconvenient.
But it wasn't show-stopping. USC will fight-on.
So will Sanchez, who seems to have come up a huge winner before getting a single NFL regular season snap.
Dr. Gary S. Goodman is a top speaker, negotiation consultant, attorney, TV and radio commentator and the best-selling author of 12 books. He conducts seminars and speaks at convention programs around the world. He can be reached at gary@customersatisfaction.com.
