USC takes down No. 2 Stanford in major upset

Everything was stacked against USC going into their Sunday game against their fierce rival in the No. 2-ranked Stanford Cardinal. The Trojans were nearly 16-point underdogs, they had lost 14 straight games to Stanford and, to top it all off, they were missing their leading scorer in graduate forward Kadi Sissoko for the fourth straight game. But none of that mattered to graduate guard Destiny Littleton and the rest of the Trojans as they handled business by shutting Stanford down on offense and winning by a score of 55-46.

“Especially in the fourth quarter I had a flashback to [the UCLA game], and I didn’t want that to be the outcome. And throughout the game I knew this was going to be a possession game. I knew, just because we jumped out on them in the first quarter, the game wasn’t over,” said Littleton in a postgame interview.”We had to come with not an ordinary effort, and I think we did that.”

The Trojans took the lead 14 seconds into the game and never looked back. They dominated the first quarter, holding Stanford to a measly four points, and forced six turnovers to go along with eight missed shots in what would set the tone for the rest of the game. Junior guard Kayla Williams helped set that tone, marking Stanford from full-court and never allowing them to settle in at any point during the game.

But as halftime approached, Stanford was closing in on the USC lead. With just over a minute left in the first half, the Trojans were seemingly limping to the break as they missed 12 of their 14 field goal attempts in the second quarter, and Stanford was able to tie the game at 19. But a clutch 3-pointer by redshirt freshman guard Taylor Bigby and then a buzzer-beating layup by Littleton pushed the Trojans’ lead back up to 5 going into the break. Stanford would never get the game closer than two points after that.

“We never wavered in who we wanted to be, we weren’t perfect the whole time, but we stayed with our mentality, and I think that was incredible,” said Head Coach Lindsay Gottlieb after the win. “You need a special effort to beat the number two team in the country, we couldn’t just show up ordinary. We made a great version of ourselves and that’s what we were.”

One of the keys to the Trojans maintaining their lead was their ability to light it up from three-point range. They shot 42% from behind the arc, well above their season average of 33%. USC started the second half by making three of the first four shots from downtown, but no three was bigger than the final shot of the third quarter. With time dwindling down, Williams hit a deep buzzer-beating three that brought Galen to their feet to push the Trojans’ lead to 10 to end the third.

USC continued to make Stanford uncomfortable, forcing 14 turnovers and keeping a team that was 12th in the nation in terms of field goal percentage to only 31% from the field. The Trojans would close the last eight minutes and 47 seconds without scoring a field goal, but it didn’t matter as USC held Stanford to only five made baskets in the fourth quarter. 

Littleton’s confident playstyle led the way for USC, as she had the most points in the game with 18. It seemed as if whenever the Trojans needed a clutch basket, she was there to deliver it for them, helping USC pull off their first win against a top-two team since 2008.

“I understand the game a little bit more, and [Gottlieb] trusted me to do a lot and just having that connection, like okay, we’re on a run or they’re on a run, let’s get a good possession here,” Littleton said. “I think we all believed in what we could be and now we’re finally seeing the benefits of it.”

The loss ended the Cardinal’s 39-game winning streak against the Pac-12, with their last loss happening in 2021. Stanford’s 46 points were the least amount of points they’ve scored in a game in seven years, when they scored 36 against UCLA in 2017. Going into the game, Stanford was the 10th-highest scoring team in the nation, averaging 82.5 points per game. The Cardinal scored just over half of that against USC’s defense.

At the end of the game, Gottlieb addressed the crowd of fans whose team has not made the NCAA tournament since 2014. She told them how proud she was of the team and then said what everyone in the crowd was thinking, “we are building something special.” 

The Trojans now have four straight away games and next see action when they take on Washington State at 7 p.m. on Friday.