LOS ANGELES — The only way for his USC men’s basketball team to win in the Big Ten, Eric Musselman has realized, is to collectively ascend to a sort of higher focus for 40 minutes of basketball.
At times, they’re simply out-talented, as Musselman pointed out Saturday night. At times, other programs simply have more depth. The margin for error has been razor-thin, in a conference where “everybody is beating everybody,” as USC point guard Desmond Claude put it. Northwestern (12-10, 3-8 Big Ten), which USC travels 1,745 miles to face Tuesday, currently sits at 16th in the Big Ten but knocked off Maryland (fourth in the conference) in mid-January. Middling Minnesota (11-11, 3-8), which USC will host Feb. 15, has beaten Michigan and Oregon while both were top-20 teams. Dead-last Washington, which USC hosts March 5, just beat Minnesota after a six-game losing streak.
Playing in the Big Ten is like walking into a thicket of brambles: look too far behind, or too far forward, and you’ll end up with a faceful of thorns. The only way to survive, ultimately, is to stare straight ahead.
“I think our team’s done not a good job of that,” Musselman said Saturday, “but great. Like, they don’t look past an opponent.”
They are upstarts in a new conference, a roster of 11 transfers now sitting in the top half of the Big Ten heading into a road trip against Northwestern and seventh-ranked Purdue. They knocked off top-25 Illinois, in Champaign. They knocked off Nebraska, in Lincoln. They tucked away powerhouse Michigan State at Galen Center Saturday.
For their efforts, USC (13-8, 5-5 Big Ten) ranks … still a distant 59th in the all-mighty KenPom ratings, used among other metrics by NCAA selection committees to determine the tournament’s field of 68. They sit behind Northwestern. They sit behind Arizona State, losers of six of their last eight. They sit, squarely, on the bubble.
And in a two-minute soliloquy on the state of modern collegiate basketball at the end of Saturday’s presser, Musselman — who, at heart, is more of an NBA guy than a college guy — railed against the rule-makers of the sport.
“I mean, a computer doesn’t understand basketball,” Musselman said, scoffing and smiling in the same breath. “So how’s a computer deciding who should be in the tournament? It’s unfathomable. It doesn’t happen in any other walk of life, to my knowledge. And if it does, I’d love to know what it is.”
USC’s resume has been crippled by a rocky first month: a loss to Cal (11-11), a 35-point loss to Saint Mary’s, a few unemphatic wins over mid-major schools. It’s that last point that hurts, in particular. KenPom is calculated using net rating, which invariably factors in margin of victory.
“College basketball is about development,” Musselman said postgame. “How are you supposed to develop younger players if you beat teams by 30, and that has something to do with your resume at the end of the year? It doesn’t even make sense.”
It means that this USC team would have to brave a gauntlet to make any kind of miraculous run at March in Musselman’s first season.
The path, though, is still there, without the computers. Let’s veer into the weeds for a moment. USC currently sits at 3-6 in Quad 1 games, defined as a home game against a team in the top 30 of the NCAA’s NET rankings or road game against a team in the top 75. As the rankings currently set, seven more Quad 1 games currently remain out of 10 on the Trojans’ schedule. For context, 22 of 23 teams (sorry, Providence) with at least six Quad 1 wins made the NCAA Tournament last season.
All this to say — if USC breaks even the rest of the year and wins a couple big games in the right places, they could sneak into the field in Musselman’s first year with the program, a feat he didn’t accomplish in Year One at Nevada or Arkansas.
“I mean, now we’ve had two humongous wins,” Musselman said Saturday, referring to USC’s games against Illinois and Michigan State, “and there’s still a lot of basketball to be played.”
That’s a good thing, for USC’s tournament hopes. It also means a month where every game carries weight, and the only way to move forward is to stare straight ahead.
“We’re keeping an eye on it, and they let us know sometimes,” Claude said Saturday, of USC’s tournament hopes. “But the Big Ten is so hard that we’re not really worried about that right now.”
USC at Northwestern
When: Tuesday, 6 p.m.
Where: Welsh Ryan Arena, Evanston, Ill.
TV/radio: Big Ten Network/USCTrojans.com
USC at Purdue
When: Friday, 4 p.m.
Where: Mackey Arena, West Lafayette, Ind.
TV/radio: FS1/USCTrojans.com