It was just noise. Just sound and fury, signifying what it always signifies.

No one at USC seriously considered firing Clay Helton. Monday’s breathless headlines were a reaction without an action.

In the world of nothingburgers, it wasn’t quite like the press conference that former LSU basketball coach Dale Brown once held to announce he was not going to search for Noah’s Ark, but it was close.

Thanks to the pitchfork wing of USC’s fan base, Helton’s sacking was treated as a fait accompli. Much of the media was complicit. Lists of successors were prepared. Recruits were being dropped from USC’s lists. Sometimes, the grumbling becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Not here, at least not now.

Let’s be clear. Helton can’t go 5-7 again and keep this job. He acutely knows how inexcusable it was to lose to Cal and UCLA. The schedule was tough, sure, and USC was one of only two teams to beat Washington State, which is a fairly lame lead-in to your 2018 highlight film. But USC’s other four victims were 16-32.

Helton must quit playing his self-indulgent personal-foulers who foolishly ruin fourth quarters. He has to revive the running game. He must find real, hungry football players, not just those with five stars on their names. He has to determine why USC kept blowing early leads and, if that means overhauling the conditioning programs, so be it. Brian Kelly did that and much more after Notre Dame went 4-8 two years ago and got destroyed by USC. Since then the Irish are 22-3.

But even with Oregon and Washington returning to next year’s schedule and with a deceptively tough opener against Fresno State, USC has a chance. Anybody with a quarterback like JT Daniels does.

This year, Daniels was an 18-year-old trying to compete in a Pac-12 with graduate transfers (Wilton Speight, Gardner Minshew), seniors (Jake Browning, Manny Wilkins) and juniors (Khalil Tate, Tyler Huntley, Steven Montez). If his performance against Notre Dame is a prelude, he can scrub away the stains.

Some Trojans backers showed a ghoulish glee in their campaign to make this non-story real. It’s odd, and a little pathetic, because of Helton’s class and affability. Firing him would upend the lives of a staff of assistant coaches and their wives and children.

Helton himself would have been fine, since he is contracted through 2023 and could have waited for calls from Texas Tech, Louisville, North Carolina (which is re-hiring Mack Brown) and others as the dominos fall. Few candidates have a résumé that includes a Rose Bowl win, a Cotton Bowl trip, and a Pac-12 championship in two years. The third year? Add it in, and Helton still is 26-13 (.667).

But the USC base thinks the Trojans should win by divine right, that Pete Carroll’s rock-star years were actually the norm. The truth is USC was extraordinarily lucky to have Carroll, up to the point that the Trojans were socked with one of the most severe NCAA penalties in history.

Carroll and Jimmy Johnson might be the most successful NFL/college coaches in the history in the game. Even now Carroll has the Seahawks up and running without Richard Sherman, Marshawn Lynch and the pistons of that Super Bowl machine. And when he was hired, most of his subsequent idolators dismissed him as a “failed NFL coach.”

The truth is that USC is no more immune from the misfortunes of college football than Miami, Michigan, Nebraska, Florida, Florida State, Penn State and Texas are.

If you take 1990-2000 and then 2010-2015, the before-and-after Carroll years that led to the full-time hiring of Helton, USC is 123-83-5 (.574).

In those 17 seasons, USC went to one Rose Bowl (1996, beating Northwestern) and shared only two Pac-10 titles.

Helton’s league title in 2017 was USC’s first since 2008. Until 2017, no USC team coached by anybody but Carroll had won an outright conference title since Larry Smith in 1989.

Lynn Swann, the athletic director, played for the Pittsburgh Steelers, who have had three head coaches since 1970. All have won Super Bowls, yes, but Bill Cowher took 15 years to win his and survived a couple of 6-10s along the way.

Swann’s A.D. credentials are now questioned because we’ve all become accustomed to ADs as glorified fund-raisers who speak the corporate gibberish and never have coached or won anything. The Texas Tech A.D. said he wanted a coach who could return Tech to the “elite level” in football. Return?

With a new USC president in 2019 and with one fewer contract year to buy out, Swann will do what needs to be done, provided something does.

Until then, no news is no news.