There’s never much love lost between USC and UCLA, but when it comes to the schools’ respective men’s basketball head coaches, that’s far from the case.
After last night’s Pac-12 Tournament semifinal, in which the Bruins defeated the Trojans to advance to Saturday’s championship game, UCLA head coach Mick Cronin wasted no time putting that fact on full display when speaking about USC’s March Madness seeding ahead of Sunday’s 3 p.m. selection show.
“They’ve had an unbelievable year,” Cronin said of USC. “Their projected seed is ridiculously low. That’s typical of the West Coast bias.”
USC had spent the last couple weeks of the season holding steady as a No. 6 seed in the eyes of most bracketologists, but ESPN’s Joe Lunardi slipped the team to No. 7 on March 4. The Trojans could possibly have played themselves into five- or maybe even four-seed territory had they won the Pac-12 Tournament — especially if they’d beaten Arizona to do so — but Friday’s loss likely throws that possibility out the window. As of Saturday, Lunardi and Sports Illustrated’s Kevin Sweeney have USC as a No. 7 seed, though CBS’ Jerry Palm has the Trojans as a No. 5.
The Trojans are admittedly trending in the wrong direction at the wrong time. They’ve lost three of their last four games, and their lone Pac-12 Tournament win was a narrow four-point victory over sixth-seeded Washington.
In fairness, the three losses didn’t come against lousy competition. The Trojans fell to No. 2 overall Arizona on March 1, and the other two defeats came at the hands of No. 13 UCLA.
It wasn’t merely the fact that the Trojans lost those games, though — it was how they lost them. USC was dismantled by Arizona in a 20-point beatdown, and the Trojans played from behind for the majority of last weekend’s seven-point loss to UCLA before a somewhat uncompetitive 10-point semifinal on Friday.
Still, USC’s regular season in totality is nothing to scoff at. The Trojans went 25-6, including 14-6 in Pac-12 play, and one of those wins came against the same UCLA team it fell to twice in the past week — suggesting it’s not a complete mismatch. USC went a respectable 4-4 in Quadrant I games (Arizona and UCLA, for context, each went 5-3) and 5-1 against Quad II opponents.
Head coach Andy Enfield laid out his team’s credentials in Friday’s postgame press conference, pointing to USC’s 14-4 record away from home and a 7-3 road mark in conference play, but clarified he’s not particularly invested in the projections.
“If you look at the teams around the country, winning half your games on the road — there’s not a lot of teams that have done that,” Enfield said. “What seed we are, I have no idea. That’s up to the selection committee … Whoever we play, wherever we play, we’ll be ready.”
And while worry over the team’s recent slide is certainly justified, Enfield, for his part, doesn’t seem too concerned.
“We lost in the semifinals last year, then we regrouped and played really well for a couple weeks in Indianapolis in the bubble,” Enfield said. “So we’re looking forward to this. It’s an exciting time of year.”