'The antithesis of Pete Carroll': Could stoic and steady Dave Aranda win big at USC?

LOS ANGELES — Day after day, the search stays quiet. Two months in, the hunt for clues as to who may be anointed the next USC head football coach has guided us to the unlikeliest of places, to a high school social studies classroom located 70 miles due east of downtown, where the sprawl of the Inland Empire meets the desert's edge.

Here, inside a trailer tucked behind Redlands High, sits a bookshelf. On that bookshelf sits a thick white binder gathering dust aside dozens of others just like it. Taken together, they represent an encyclopedia of football strategy compiled during Miguel Olmedo's three decades coordinating the Redlands defense. Nobody would notice this particular fountain of knowledge if not for the label, scrawled in black Sharpie, featuring a name that grows in aura with each passing fall:

"DAVE ARANDA"

Olmedo, built like a linebacker but newly retired from coaching them, grabs the binder from the shelf, and soon he is transported back to the early '90s, when a kid nicknamed "Fencepost" because he offered so few words was somehow voted captain by his teammates. That was Dave. He never had to say much to lead. He just kept reading, listening, jotting down notes, learning the craft of football however he could, until he was back with Olmedo in 2004 at an Office Depot in Redlands, making copies of a plan for coaching defense that needed a 37-topic table of contents.

Aranda had been coaching linebackers at Houston, a good job in Conference USA. But his alma mater, Division III California Lutheran,