Don’t hit the panic button on USC just yet

As my friend and I were walking home after USC men’s basketball suffered a 78-57 defeat to No. 20 Colorado Saturday night, we struck up a conversation with a fellow student who obviously knows college basketball. Even after a blowout home loss to a conference rival, this student was still upbeat about the Trojans’ chances to make something of this season. 

It was hard to agree after the performance I had just witnessed, but he made some good points. He argued that USC’s strong record — in and out of conference — as well as the fact that all the team’s losses have come against quality opponents still had it poised for its first NCAA Tournament since 2017. 

The Trojans are 17-5 with a 6-3 conference record, and the way he saw it, an identical 6-3 mark in the team’s final nine games is both plausible and sufficient to make March Madness. They’re still second in the Pac-12, and maintaining their current level of play would likely land them a first-round bye for the conference tournament, a helpful boost for their chances of winning the event and an automatic bid to the Big Dance.

I’m still not as optimistic as this bastion of college basketball knowledge, but he somehow convinced me that a 21-point home loss wasn’t a total catastrophe. 

Let’s start with the schedule. USC has three games left that stick out as particularly tough: two against Arizona and its talented cast of freshmen and a rematch with the Buffaloes in Boulder. If the Trojans can manage a victory in that home game against the Wildcats, they’ll be in good shape.

That’s because the rest of their opponents aren’t exactly a murderer’s row. USC has a home-and-home against Arizona State, which sits at 13-8 and the picture of mediocrity with a 4-4 conference record. There’s a road matchup with Utah, which did push the Trojans at home earlier last week but don’t have the talent to consistently match up with USC. The Trojans also host Washington State, which sports a 1-5 road record on the season, and UCLA, who USC dispatched easily at Pauley Pavilion a few weeks ago. That sounds like five wins.

That leaves Washington, who clobbered USC 72-40 in early January in Seattle. But many things are different now from then, namely that Huskies sophomore guard Quade Green was ruled academically ineligible and suspended for the season following Washington’s bludgeoning of USC. The Huskies have gone 1-7 in Green’s absence and fallen to last place in the conference. Does that sound like a team that’s likely to come into Galen Center and take it to the Trojans?

That’s the thing about this USC group — it only loses to good teams. The Trojans were never going to beat Oregon or Washington on the road. The blowout losses to Colorado and Marquette were discouraging, but Colorado couldn’t seem to miss Saturday while Marquette senior guard Markus Howard unsurprisingly outclassed the Trojans en route to  51 points. That’s a big number in the college game, but Howard is one of the best players in the country, leading the NCAA with 27.9 points per game. The performance by the Trojans was bad, but did you expect them to lock Howard up or something?

There are two positives to this outlook on the team. One, you can expect the Trojans to win most of their remaining games and a round or two in Vegas because of the poor competition. Two, they’ll have plenty of tape on and experience with the conference’s heavyweights come the later rounds of the Pac-12 Tournament. 

The cool thing about this college basketball season is that there is no dominant team. That’s especially true of the Pac-12, where the schools are always beating up on each other and any squad that seems to emerge as the favorite always seems to get taken down a peg by a team everyone had written off. USC isn’t the best team in the conference, but if it can get a bye and limit its tournament matchups with the conference’s best teams, anything can happen for a few games in a diluted conference.

I’m not here to convince you that it’s all sunshine and rainbows for this team. The fact that two of its best three players are non-shooting bigs has caused serious spacing issues that have sunk the offense for most of the last two games. That’s been especially true in the first half, as the Trojans have forced themselves to play from behind. There have been times that they were able to recover, but I hope that ass-kicking the Buffaloes handed them taught them that’s not the best approach and kicks them into gear.

The Trojans have flashed brilliance at times this season, from the 20-point comeback against Stanford to the effort at Oregon that nearly netted USC a top-tier victory. But they’ve been maddeningly inconsistent, as they should be. Their best player, forward Onyeka Okongwu, is a freshman, and so is starting point guard Ethan Anderson. More youngsters, sophomore guard Elijah Weaver and freshman forward Isaiah Mobley, play big roles off the bench. 

Young teams are prone to making mistakes and putting up duds, so that must be understood. But this group’s ceiling is higher than it has been in years, so I implore you to keep an open mind about it. Yes, the Trojans are much more likely to collapse as the regular season closes, get bounced in the opening round in Vegas and miss the Tournament than they are to go on a fairy tale run to the Final 4, but I promise you that’s not all that matters. Sometimes it’s just fun to watch some talented guys play basketball, mistakes and all.

To those who got too excited over USC’s success and are now sounding the doomsday alarm, I have two pieces of advice: Calm down, and keep watching. I think you’ll be glad you did. 

Aidan Berg is a junior writing about sports. He is also a features editor for Daily Trojan. His column, “Berg is the Word,” runs every  other Monday.