New Delhi, Sept. 5 -- Clay Helton twice became the head football coach at Southern California under bizarre circumstances. The folksy assistant stepped up both times to calm the perpetual chaos around the Trojans, whose attempts to recapture their past glories over the past 15 years have usually failed.

Helton then held this perilous job longer than almost anyone expected, coaching 70 games over parts of eight seasons at one of college football's most prestigious programs until his firing four years ago.

Helton is returning to the venerable Coliseum on Saturday to face USC (1-0) with Georgia Southern (0-1), the Sun Belt school where he landed two months after saying goodbye to the West Coast.

As anyone who knows him would expect, Helto...