From USC to Langston, Mike Garrett is still all about winning

LANGSTON, Oklahoma  --  If  Mike Garrett has his way, he hasn't won his last college football national championship.

Four years after he was replaced as USC's athletic director in the wake of severe NCAA penalties, Garrett is again driving a college sports program toward visions of prominence.

Garrett is the athletic director at Langston University, a historically black college in rural Oklahoma. There, the man who oversaw a USC program that won nearly two dozen national titles and generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue supervises nine teams — four men's, five women's — that compete in the National Assn. of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA).

Garrett, who turned 70 in April, declined an interview request from The Times to discuss his work and vision for Langston and to reflect on his time at USC. But in an article published in the Oklahoman last August, Garrett sounded as if he was planning to build Langston into a power.

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