After leading USC men’s basketball for over a decade, head coach Andy Enfield will leave Los Angeles for Southern Methodist University, who hired Enfield Monday to serve in the same role for the Mustangs.
Enfield departs Los Angeles exactly 11 years after he took over the program, after experiencing a down year in 2023-24.
The Trojans finished tied for ninth in the Pac-12 with an 8-12 conference record and a 15-18 overall record, having entered the 2023-24 season with high expectations following the recruitment of Bronny James and the No. 2 prospect in the class of 2023, Isaiah Collier. Enfield also retained high-level college veterans Boogie Ellis and Kobe Johnson from the squads that played in March Madness in 2021-22 and 2022-23.
SMU, on the other hand, seems like an ascendant program where Enfield can create a legacy as he did at USC and Florida Gulf Coast, where his “Dunk City” team became the first No. 15 seed to ever play in the NCAA Tournament’s Sweet 16.
Due to the conference realignment arms race that broke out following the Pac-12′s dissolution, SMU will join the Atlantic Coast Conference for the 2024-25 season alongside Cal and Stanford, where the Mustangs will play against college basketball “blue bloods” Duke and North Carolina.
As recently as 2022-23, SMU lingered around the bottom of the American Athletic Conference. But under now-former head coach Rob Lanier, SMU improved to an 11-7 AAC record in 2023-24 — good enough to tie for fifth place — and ended their season with a first-round loss to Indiana State in the National Invitation Tournament, the second-tier postseason competition.
Had Enfield stayed at USC, he would’ve faced a serious roster rebuilding job.
Ellis exhausted his collegiate eligibility in 2023-24, Collier will likely declare for the 2024 NBA Draft as a potential lottery selection and Johnson announced on March 22 that he would both enter the transfer portal and test the draft waters himself, leaving at least three major holes in the Trojans’ roster.
Enfield will end his USC tenure as one of the program’s greatest-ever coaches. The Pennsylvania native and former Johns Hopkins standout took over the men’s basketball team when they were a middling Pac-12 program and brought the Trojans back to the NCAA Tournament by his third season.
In a statement on his departure, USC athletic director Jennifer Cohen thanked Enfield for helping to raise USC’s level in men’s basketball.
“He elevated and established USC Men’s Basketball as a premier program with a strong national presence,” Cohen said. She also announced that her department had begun the search for a new head coach.
“We have a track record of competitiveness, passionate supporters and fans, a robust donor collective, and are about to compete in the nation’s premier athletic conference,” Cohen said. “There is no ceiling to what our program can achieve and I look forward to introducing our next head coach.”
Enfield’s teams would go on to earn five March Madness berths, the best result of which came in 2021, when an Evan Mobley-led team crushed the No. 3 seed Kansas Jayhawks 85-51 in the Second Round and the Trojans would go on to make the Elite Eight. USC also achieved its highest ranking in the AP Poll since in the 1974-75 season, when the Trojans climbed as high as No. 5 in January 2022.