Its head coach resigned for a new job; yet somehow, USC men’s basketball ended up in a better spot.

Days after Andy Enfield jumped ship to take the coaching job at Southern Methodist University, USC announced it hired Arkansas’ Head Coach Eric Musselman to take over the helm.

There is no world in which Musselman is not a step up from Enfield. It is not as if SMU poached Enfield because the Mustangs are a better program than the Trojans; the schools’ respective recent and long-term history prove that. USC has made 21 NCAA Tournament appearances overall and 11 this century, while SMU has earned 12 bids and only two in the 2000s.

“SMU has a lot of tradition as well, maybe not on the national scale basketball-wise because they haven’t been in a power conference for 30 years or so,” Enfield said in his introductory SMU press conference. “This university is ready to get there, and ready to be there at the highest level.”

While the Mustangs are heading into the vaunted ACC, their mere two conference championships in 11 years as members of the American Athletic Conference suggests they might not be ready to move into a stiff ACC league that sent four teams to the Sweet 16 during the 2024 Big Dance, the most of any conference.

The Trojans are similarly heading to a new, stiffer conference in the Big Ten, but are securing a coach in Musselman who led an Arkansas team that consistently performed well in March during his tenure.

The driver of what is colloquially called “The Muss Bus,” Musselman has made it to six NCAA Tournaments in nine years as head coach between Arkansas and Nevada. In his five years with the Razorbacks, Musselman made it to the Big Dance and advanced to the Sweet 16 three times, making it to the Elite Eight on two of those trips.

That’s the same number of Sweet 16s in five years as the Trojans have made since 1962.

Before criticizing USC’s new head coach, that stark statistic is what fans need to look at first.

But one of the knocks on Musselman is that he did not have the best record in SEC play despite the level of talent at his disposal. The Razorbacks signed the No. 2 class in the country in the 2022 cycle according to 247Sports’ composite rankings, including three top-20 recruits and another two top-100 players.

That 2022-23 season — when all of the recruits were freshmen — Arkansas went a mere 8-10 in conference play, but did enough to earn an at-large bid and a No. 8 seed in the Big Dance. The Razorbacks, in what could be considered a disappointing regular season given their No. 2 class, still managed to upset the No. 1-seeded Kansas Jayhawks before falling to the eventual champion University of Connecticut Huskies in the Sweet 16.

This is where modern-day men’s college basketball is going. Young teams tend to fall to more veteran teams. That is why a school like Kentucky — that is reportedly losing Head Coach John Calipari to Arkansas — has been upset by the No. 14-seeded University of Oakland this year and No. 15-seeded Saint Peter’s University in 2022, despite bringing in a top-10 recruiting class in every cycle for as long as 247Sports has tracked class rankings.

The Razorbacks had a good mix of seasoned players and young talent in their most recent tournament run. It was the Arkansas veterans who carried the team to that upset win over Kansas. Then-junior guard Davonte Davis totaled 25 points and then-junior guard Ricky Council IV put up 21. All of the three top-20 recruits were near non-factors against the Jayhawks, combining for 14 points. The three freshmen all left college after one year, though, as they were all drafted to the NBA in 2023.

This column has previously been critical of Enfield, and while Musselman is not without his issues, USC Athletics did the best it could given the circumstances. The Trojans — without a national championship and only two Final Four appearances — have not been historically strong in men’s basketball and were never going to bring in a top-shelf coach.

But what USC is bringing in is a coach who has Power Five coaching experience and multiple deep tournament runs. Enfield left the program better than he found it, but he was never the man to win the Trojans a national championship.

Musselman has yet to win a national championship of his own and has had some struggles — particularly this year after losing the three one-and-dones, leading to a 16-17 record and a 6-12 SEC mark. But he’s proven he can recruit at an elite level — which was Enfield’s calling card in his 11 years at USC — and can parlay that into tournament success, up to a certain point thus far in his career. 

Where Musselman can improve is developing veteran players who can pair with the star freshmen who only play in college for one year. That way, the Trojans can show an ability to get players to the NBA under Musselman, but also have tournament success through the combination of those veterans and young players.

The road is tough for Musselman for the next year, if not longer. The transfer portal and graduations have decimated the Trojan roster, as the only remaining scholarship members of the team are freshman guard Isaiah Collier, sophomore forward Brandon Gardner, junior forward Harrison Hornery and transfer commit Josh Cohen.

The new Trojan head coach was still a home-run hire at the end of the day. The results might not be there on day one, or even day 200, but the Trojans will be in a better spot under Musselman than they were under Enfield, particularly when it comes to postseason success.

It’s time to get on the Muss Bus.

Thomas Johnson is a junior writing about USC’s move to a new conference and all of the implications surrounding the transition in his column, “Big Ten Bites,” which runs every other Monday.