The silence is deafening at USC

I'm worried about USC.

Worried the Trojans have fallen into the same trap that Manny Ramirez fell into when he doped to gain an edge and then went into hiding when he was caught. The trap should be easy enough to spot. It's affixed with a sign:

Win at Any Cost.

Once inside this trap, ethics fly out the window. A new mind-set is created: Win enough, with enough flash, and few will care how you climbed to the top, particularly not the die-hard boosters who shell out big money for season tickets, new facilities and the right to gloat about their team. Win enough, with enough sizzle, and the hard questions will be easy to elude. There will be no need for explanation. Probably, no day of reckoning will ever come.

I'm worried about USC because nobody is talking. There's no real word from the coaches, Pete Carroll and Tim Floyd, whose teams now sit squarely in the NCAA's cross hairs over well-publicized accusations of payments and favors to athletes who made a real difference in every game they played.

More important, maybe more serious, there's also nothing coming from the men who hired the coaches. Steven Sample, USC's president? Silence. Mike Garrett, USC's athletic director? The same.

Last week, when I submitted a request to interview Garrett, Floyd, Carroll and Sample, the university's media relations department essentially said, Sorry, but on the advice of school lawyers, there won't be any talking from anybody while an NCAA investigation is underway.

With all the nyets the media is getting, it's as if USC has suddenly morphed into the Soviet Politburo, circa 1972.

I'm hardly alone. When a colleague who covers USC basketball recently attended a boosters dinner given by the Trojans in Irvine, what he mostly got was a cloud of evasive dust.

Despite a warning that questions about the investigation were off limits, one in the crowd asked the coaches if the school was ever going to emerge from the NCAA doghouse. Carroll answered by saying he'd long wanted to build a program where "everyone was coming after us." Such scrutiny, he gushed, was the price paid "for being on top."

I'm an admirer of Carroll, not nearly as much for what he's done on the football field as for what he's done in our inner cities. But I'm sorry, his answer to that booster turns the stomach. It was wrongheaded. You want people coming after you on the field, not with these kinds of accusations. It was arrogant. The kind of arrogance that leads to trouble by blinding truth and shadowing humility.