USC athletic donation site suspiciously down amid Clay Helton confusion

Many USC donors are desperate for the football program to make a head coaching change and bring in a big name that can help turn things around, but those angry supporters are not going to be able to make any rash financial decisions on Wednesday. Why? Because the website is down, of course.

Earlier in the week, a report that was quickly disputed stated that USC plans to fire Clay Helton and pursue Urban Meyer. On Tuesday night, however, Football Scoop’s Zach Barnett reported that USC intends to keep Helton and could announce a formal decision as early as Wednesday.

That has left many fans — including the ones with deep pockets — disappointed. Ironically, Andy Staples of The Athletic pointed out that the website where donors log into their Trojan Athletic Fund account (where they could, in theory, change the amounts of their donations to the program) was experiencing technical difficulties on Wednesday.

In case you’re wondering, a person still couldn’t log into their Trojan Athletic Fund account if they wanted to, say, change the amount of money they donate to the program. What a spectacular coincidence. pic.twitter.com/4LUlltA7nS — Andy Staples (@Andy_Staples) December 4, 2019

Someone quickly pointed out that the site was down due to a scheduled system switch that was announced in advance, but that doesn’t make it any less amusing.

They’re transitionig over to a different system at the moment. It was a planned outage that was announced to donors a while ago. People attempting to log into the site right now should know the system is down. — Scott Simpson (@ScottASimpson) December 4, 2019

Even if the timing is a total coincidence, it may have worked out nicely for USC.

Helton looked all but certain to be fired after the Trojans started 3-3 this year, but they won five of their last six games to finish the regular season 8-4. The belief for many is that Helton has been given long enough and is not going to magically turn USC into a national championship contender, but the school apparently believes in him enough to give him another shot.

It’s worth noting that keeping Helton for another season does not necessarily mean USC won’t be pursuing Meyer. In fact, they may have a better chance to land the three-time national champion after next season.

USC fans, show everyone who runs LA with this great T-shirt: