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You can’t shut USC football coach (and ex-coaches) up ... on Twitter

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Legal counsel has advised USC not to talk about the ongoing NCAA investigation that may, or may not, imperil the school’s football and basketball programs.

But USC Coach Pete Carroll and two top Trojan assistant football coaches during the Reggie Bush era, Lane Kiffin and Steve Sarkisian, are dominating as nonstop chatterboxes on Twitter, the new social network microblog.

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Kiffin and Sarkisian are now head coaches at Tennessee and Washington, respectively, and have learned from the master about getting the message THEY want to get out to the masses.

There is -- shockingly! -- fraudulence going on in the brave new world of Twittering. St. Louis Cardinals’ manager Tony La Russa just settled a lawsuit with Twitter over a bogus site using his name. UCLA football Coach Rick Neuheisel does not have a Twitter account, but there are two sites out there with his name on them. One has the username Slick R. Neuheisel -- probably not the real Rick.

The NCAA, however, has posted a sampling of major college coaches with Twitter accounts, so we figure this link is legit.

We did a cursory check of traffic and found USC coaches -- present and past -- dominating like no other program.

Follower counts as of late-morning Monday:

Pete Carroll (USC): 24,188

Lane Kiffin (Tennessee): 7,403

Steve Sarkisian (Washington): 4,140

OK, some perspective. Sarkisian, taking over an 0-12 team, versus other Twittering coaches:

Bob Stoops (Oklahoma) 921

Charlie Weis (Notre Dame) 5,030

Kyle Whittingham (Utah): 514

Chris Petersen (Boise State): 13.

Stoops has won a national championship and appeared in more BCS title games than Kobe has rings. Weis presides over the greatest franchise in college football history, yet has less than a 1,000-follower lead over a first-year Washington coach?

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Maybe Charlie needs to ‘Tweet One for the Gipper.’ Sarkisian and Weis can compare Twitter strategies Oct. 3 when Washington and Notre Dame play in South Bend.

Whittingham and Petersen led their programs to a combined 24-0 record in the regular season last year, yet they lag thousands of followers behind Sark the Twitter Shark.

Carroll blows everybody out ... he’s the Secretariat of FBS Twitterers.

Urban Meyer, who has won two of the last three national titles at Florida, is a plow-horse by comparison with 5,213 followers. Les Miles, minder of the fanatical LSU flagship, is miles behind at 4,763.

Kiffin and Sarkisian, drafting like an Indy-car off Carroll’s magical mojo, understand the power of communication even though it has already gotten Kiffin in trouble at Tennessee.

Don’t expect to find many revelations in these postings.:

What we learned Monday from Charlie Weis was that his staff had to take the annual test on NCAA rules.

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Weis post: ‘Yes. I too have to take the test. Go Irish!’

Carroll loves to include his ‘song of the day’ and Monday referenced a ‘great story’ in Sunday’s L.A. Times ... but he certainly wasn’t referring to a piece TWO Sundays ago about USC’s public silence during the NCAA investigation. Carroll was pumping a front-page piece on the drop of crime in Los Angeles.

Southern Methodist Coach June Jones gave a Tweet-out to commemorate the D-Day anniversary: ‘How good was General Eisenhower??????’

Um, real good?

Hey, even Paterno has a Twitter account. OK, it belongs to son Jay, not Joe, the 82-year-old Penn State head coach who still prefers quill and parchment to deliver messages.

What was JayPa doing over the weekend?

Tweet: ‘more little league. yard work (way behind on that) & working on some offense.’

Twitter: How did we ever exist before it?

-- Chris Dufresne

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