This may be the slowest-moving train wreck in NCAA history. But it appears as if we are … finally … at long, long last … about to see some action pertaining to USC and the NCAA’s enforcement arm.

That was my first thought when I heard that USC basketball coach Tim Floyd had up and quit, on Tuesday. Escaping to Mississippi (or maybe Mexico?) before the NCAA cops kicked down his office door at the Galen Center and made him do a perp walk across the stage at the next basketball coaches’ convention.

That USC’s athletic program might be guilty of breaking a rule or 10 … well, that comes as no surprise to anyone who has spent more than 10 minutes in Heritage Hall in this decade.

As I wrote in this entry more than a year ago, there has been a sense of programs-outta-control around the Trojans for years. It got going with Pete Carroll and shifted into overdrive with Tim Floyd. (And just for purposes of conversation, that entry I just linked to, from May of 2008, has had more hits than any entry in the history of this blog. I would never, ever have guessed that would be the case.)

I’m a little surprised that Floyd was busted sooner than was Pete but, then, Pete is far more clever than Tim Floyd and lots of people genuinely like and admire Pete Carroll (me, for example) and aren’t rooting for him and the football team to take a fall. Even if that program, too, has all but dumped the quaint notion of “student athlete” in favor of “professional athlete.”

So, what happens next?

For starters, lets pencil in the Trojans for last place in the Pac-10 basketball race next season. The program was in trouble when four underclassmen announced they were going pro (prompting the classic Floyd quote about how Kansas has two potential NBA lottery picks coming back for at least another year in Lawrence, but “Our guys get an offer from Islamabad and they’re gone”). Then what looked like a great 2009 recruiting class evaporated once word got around that NCAA sniffer dogs were hanging around Floyd’s office. Who’s left in the program? Child rapper and basketball legend-in-his-own-mind Lil’ Romeo? A couple of walk-ons? Can anyone in Romeo’s posse play?  (At least Floyd didn’t have to pay Lil’ Romeo to come to Troy; Romeo makes more money than Floyd ever did.)

Second, and the more pertinent question for USC, where basketball is a sideshow, is “whither the football program?” That “Reggie Bush and the $300,000 in cash, etc.” thing is still hanging around, festering. Are Floyd and the hoops program the first and second dominos to fall, followed by Pete and football? That’s the nightmare scenario at Troy.

I was thinking how this all reminds me of Watergate a little. (Those of you under 50 can skip ahead, since this involves U.S. history.) Remember how Nixon had things buttoned up fairly well? The break-in and all, and the hard men who got nabbed inside the DNC headquarters were going to go along fairly quietly, do a little time, and the whole thing would go away … and then a few peripheral figures, like Donald Segretti (a USC alum, by the way) started to sing, and then once it got up to White House lawyer John Dean, who was not going to prison for the Nixon Administration … well, school was out, followed shortly by Richard Milhouse Nixon.

Does USC now unravel like the Nixon Administration? Do peripheral figures who are, so far, putting themselves at risk by remaining mute out of loyalty (or fear) they feel toward a team, a program, a school … begin calculating the damage to their own careers and earning power … and spill? (One name that comes to mind: USC running backs coach Todd McNair. Is he gonna take a fall for Pete and Troy? Maybe not.)

Then there is the whole issue of … “What did Mike Garrett know, and when did he know it?” There is a temptation to cast school president Steve Sample in the Nixon role, but Sample seems to have a pretty good firewall of deniability built up around him (“I’m all about academics, except when it comes to hiring Pete”), so Garrett, the athletic director, probably is the guy who eventually will say, “I am not a crook!” A few weeks before he resigns.

As my entry from a year ago suggested, beyond the specific allegations of rules-breaking, there is just a vibe of “things out of control” around the Trojans. And has been for years. Even before Tim Floyd first made an appearance.

It was Floyd, though, who may bring down the football program, as silly as that seems. Being Domino No. 1, and setting off the chain reaction.

I didn’t spend a lot of time with or around Tim Floyd. Maybe a dozen games, a couple of practices. It was USC hoops, after all, even if they were pretty good there for a while. But he made several impressions rather quickly, and I suspect many others drew the same conclusions. Snap judgments, almost.

–Tim Floyd can coach. Forget about the sleaze for a moment. Tim Floyd recruited (or bought, whatever … brought in) some great athletes and was able to get them to play defense, not always a simple thing.  He came up with some schemes that utterly discombobulated UCLA and its coach, Ben Howland (usually assumed to be a better Xs and Os guy, which he clearly was not). That was impressive. He managed to instill cohesion and on-court discipline among a group of guys who looked like coachkillers from the outside. Tim Floyd may have cut some corners (OK, a lot of them), but the guys he brought in … he coached them up like nobody’s business.

–On the other hand … there is something about Tim Floyd that almost announces “shifty cheater” when he walks into a room. The moist palm. The flop sweat. The eyes that never quite settle. If Central Casting still exists, and you wanted an actor to play a crooked coach, they would send you someone who looks and acts like Tim Floyd. That is, he looked guilty of something even before he had broken his first rule. He just did. If I was suspicious and wary of what was going on with Pete and the football team, it was Tim Floyd and his accession to the USC hoops job that shifted my thinking from “they could get caught” to “they will get caught.” The stories around about Floyd handing over $1,000 in cash to one of O.J. Mayo’s peeps … absolutely believable, whether or not it actually happened.

So, back to the first graph. USC has been operating in this weird twilight world for, what, three years now? Four? Is O.J. Mayo going to come back to bite them? Is Reggie Bush? Time just kept moving on, and the Trojans kept winning and hoping it All Would Go Away … but it hasn’t, and it won’t. And it may take another year, maybe two, but the Day of Reckoning just got a lot closer the moment Tim Floyd  fled the scene and Mike Garrett congratulated him on doing so.