Almost a year after USC firing, Alex Grinch isn’t ‘trying to be Batman’ at Wisconsin

The embattled ex-USC defensive coordinator has drawn praise for his demeanor after accepting a safeties job at Wisconsin, a now-Big Ten rival for USC.

LOS ANGELES — Before he ever actually knew the man, Wisconsin linebacker Jake Chaney would see Alex Grinch’s name spewed across Twitter.

“‘Alex Grinch,’ this, that, this, that,” as Chaney put it succinctly, sitting at a podium at Tuesday’s Big Ten Media Day.

Indeed, such was a weekly occurrence within USC’s defensive doldrums for two seasons, defensive coordinator Grinch assigned the blame for USC’s late-season 2022 sag and eviscerated as the weeks continued in 2023. When it dawned on Lincoln Riley the morning of November 5 — after the Huskies had hung 52 points on USC the night before — that it was time to simply make a change, the news of Grinch’s firing came unceremonious and wholly expected, widespread fanbase relief coming at the coordinator’s expense.

In the near-year since, Grinch has posted his $4.45-million Palos Verdes home for sale, according to TMZ; took a job at Wisconsin in February as the safeties coach and co-defensive coordinator; and hardly said anything about his tenure at USC, beyond an admission there may not be another coach in the country with a bigger chip on his shoulder. There have been no extended sit-downs. No in-depth musings on what went wrong. The next step of Grinch’s career has come as quiet as the last one ended loud.

That, in a nutshell, is why Badgers head coach Luke Fickell hired Grinch, saying at Tuesday’s Big Ten Media Day he wanted guys on his staff who’d “had a lot of tough situations.”

Until the bitter end at USC, within convoluted explanations of defensive breakdowns, Grinch rarely pointed blame in any direction but himself. In his last scrum with media, a few days before the Washington game, he remarked he “couldn’t be more disappointed in myself” and “I’m not getting it done,” among other self-blame. His final words, as USC’s defensive coordinator, came in praise of his players’ fight despite a rapidly-spiraling season.

Fickell, who’d only known Grinch from a distance, noticed.

“Once I got to know him and met him a little bit, to just see and feel the humility that he has — all the things that he went through, never complained, never made an excuse, never pointed a finger – he’s a very smart football coach that is a hell of a lot better now than even he was then, because of his experiences,” Fickell said Tuesday.

Safety Hunter Wohler, one of the best returning defensive backs in the Big Ten, said with a verbal shrug Tuesday he and Grinch hadn’t talked much about the coach’s past experiences. And linebacker Jake Chaney dug his feet in for Grinch, pointing to his years of coordinator experience dating back to Washington State and Oklahoma.

“He’s won games, right,” Chaney said. “He’s found a way to win games with a defense. And having somebody like that on the staff, with this schedule we’re about to play, that’s huge.”

Wisconsin will travel to the Coliseum Sept. 28, and USC will see Grinch on an opposing sideline, along with once-beloved linebacker Tackett Curtis. It will be personal, by nature, walking in as the enemy of a fanbase that — in some sum — viewed him as an enemy when he wore cardinal and gold.

But Grinch, for now, drags no clean-slate narrative around Wisconsin’s practice field.

“He’s not trying to be Batman and prove something to everybody, right,” Chaney said. “He’s doing what’s best for Wisconsin right now. A lot of people see that, and a lot of people respect that.”