It is being reported that Pat Haden will succeed Mike Garrett as athletic director at USC, and let see if I can summarize my first impressions of that move.

“Inspired … a perfect decision … a great guy … a very very smart man … a classy dude … absolutely the right man for the job.”

Or to put it another way, hiring Pat Haden is … Maybe The Smartest Thing USC Has Done Since Enrolling John Wayne.

I love love love this move.  It will make USC better and cleaner. It’s a win-win situation.

I have some history with Pat Haden. Not, like, really personal history. But I covered the Rams home-and-road from 1977 through 1980, and Pat Haden was the Rams’ starting quarterback for most of that time, and I was among the reporters who talked to him a couple of times every week.

What stuck out about him?

1. He was a little guy in a big guy’s game. Which means he had to be smart as well as brave. His pro football reference entry lists him at 5-11, 182, and both those numbers may be stretches. He might have been 5-10 — which was seriously short for a quarterback even then. Yet he was the No. 1 quarterback for the Los Angeles Rams when they were still one of the elite franchises in the NFL, and the club was 35-19-1 in games he started … to go with the national title USC won when he was there, and the CIF title he won at Bishop Amat. So we are talking about a winner in the most basic sense of the word.

2.  He was memorable, to me, as a professional athlete who was a regular guy. Or managed to seem like it. You could have a conversation with Pat Haden. He wasn’t dismissive of journalists (and I was younger than he was, actually). He liked to be challenged, and he wanted to make sure he wasn’t seen as “one of those guys with really thick necks” as he once put it. I remember waiting to do a one-on-one interview with him after a practice at Blair Field in Long Beach, in 1977 … and I could hear him singing “Toora Loora Loora” (an Irish lullabye) in the shower. … Oh, and he probably was the only athlete who ever said something that I took as good life advice and have never forgotten. He probably didn’t invent it, but he was the first person who said to me, “Lifestyles are not adjustable downward.” Never forgot it.

In short, in three-plus decades of dealing with professional athletes, I never encountered a better human being than Pat Haden. A few in his class, but none better. Zero. I never hung with the guy, but I’d let him hold my wallet or babysit my kids.

3.  He had a slightly weird and definitely tumultuous NFL career and he still didn’t get all freaky.  In 1976, his rookie year (the year before I began covering the Rams), he fell into the job when Ron Jaworski and James Harris both got hurt. Then he took the Rams to the NFC title game, where they lost the last of those horrible “Minneapolis in January” playoff games. (He wrote a book about it, and I bet he actually did do some of the writing, considering he was a Rhodes Scholar as a Trojan.) He was rewarded for going 5-1-1 as a starter … by the Rams bringing in the washed-up Joe Namath, who started the first four games in 1977 before Chuck Knox, the Rams coach, realized the little guy with the big heart was a better call than Broadway Joe, and Haden took the job in Week 5. He held it it until the 10th week of the 1979 season, when during a game at Seattle, in the Kingdome, which had just remarkably awful artificial turf, he suffered a broken pinky when his finger got jammed in a gap in the carpet. Vince Ferragamo took over and the Rams got to the Super Bowl — where they lost 31-19 to the Steelers at the Rose Bowl, a game that would have been quite different with the careful Pat Haden at quarterback.

And then … after the 1981 season, he retired at age 28. Ferragamo had gone to Canada, and come back, and Pat Haden just walked away. He had been nicked up; he might have had a concussion. Anyway, I think by then he already was going to law school, and he became a lawyer, and I’m sure he realized early that the smart call was to get out of football while he could still walk and before he had his brains scrambled (I still remember a game in the Coliseum, in 1979, when he was sacked, like, seven times in a blowout loss to the San Diego Chargers, who had Mean Fred Dean playing defensive end. Haden took a horrific beating in that game.)

Haden could have continued playing. But he didn’t need to. In 1990, when I did a story on the 10-year anniversay of the Rams’ appearance in the 1980 Super Bowl (after the ’79 season), he already was working for a leading L.A. law firm, O’Melveny & Myers. He was blunt about how that Super Bowl was, for him,  watching it when he could have been playing in it. He said something like, “People don’t realize that when you’re hurt, in football, it’s like you don’t exist. You can’t help, so you’re expected to get out of the way. So it’s not like it was some great memory for me.”

Anyway, and you lawyers please excuse me, but even then I thought Haden was wasting his time as a lawyer. He could do more. He was smart enough and charming enough to be a politician. He ended up as a broadcaster,  and was very good at it, even if his voice is a bit high and not exactly pleasing to the ear. Then he had that long stint as the analyst for Notre Dame football, which was downright weird, because at USC he twice had led the Trojans to victories over Notre Dame, including the famous 55-24 game in 1974.

So,  Haden has remained around the college game for decades … while at the same time he has been living among the movers and shakers of Los Angeles. He was a partner with Richard Riordan — as in the mayor of Los Angeles — in a venture capital firm.

Now, we jump forward to 2010. USC has been pounded by the NCAA for some of the stuff that went on during the long, often successful but often sleazy regime of Mike Garrett.

Garrett, as I predicted when this came down, had to go. (Though the Trojans waited a lot longer than I thought they would to show the Heisman Trophy winner the door.)

Pat Haden is the perfect replacement on so many levels.

He has spent more time in the business world. He has far more experience in the TV, media side of things. He can chat up and charm anyone. Mike Garrett, especially the last five years or so, lived behind a bunker and appeared rarely to give cryptic or sarcastic answers to important questions. Pat Haden will show up and be accountable. He was doing it in 1977 when he was the Rams’ quarterback.

This is an inspired hire, and apparently the work of USC’s incoming president, Max Nikias. A great call, sir.

Here is my favorite Pat Haden quote from the early story on the L.A. Times website: “Our goal will be to compete ferociously but also ethically. There are plenty of models for that out there. Winning any way other than the right way is not winning at all.”

Two hours ago, I despaired of the Trojans and their future, especially in football. With one hire, that has changed. I now am confident they will get over this, and come back and be almost as good and a thousand times cleaner. Pat Haden will not run a sleazy program. He won’t. The only question is … will it be a successful program? … or a really successful program?

Put me down for the second answer.