USC males’s and girls’s basketball groups make comparable journeys in January, hope to play in March
The USC girls’s basketball crew acquired the celebration began once they shocked then-No. 2 Stanford on Sunday, January 14. USC was an off-the-radar girls’s basketball crew till that cut-off date. The Trojans wanted a really splashy win to make themselves an element within the hunt for an NCAA Match at-large bid. Beating the colossus of the Pac-12 in girls’s hoops was the proper technique to accomplish the purpose. USC then constructed on that necessary Stanford win by sweeping the Washington faculties on the highway. USC is probably going a No. 10 seed — a number of spots contained in the bubble minimize line for the NCAA Match, however removed from a lock or a crew safely within the Massive Dance.
The USC males appeared on the girls’s development and thought that was a good suggestion.
The Trojan men’s basketball team defeated No. 8 UCLA on Thursday, bagging the top-tier win they wanted to need to considerably enhance the standard of their portfolio. They reasonably enhanced their resume main into Thursday’s win by beating Arizona State on the highway.
Each basketball groups — women and men alike — have scored an elite win in January and paired it with second-tier wins towards bubble groups and third-tier wins towards lesser opponents. The third-tier wins won’t look like a lot, however their worth is immense. The nuance: The worth is immense not as a result of beating a mediocre crew carries a lot weight. The significance is supreme as a result of the win merely means a loss was prevented. Loss avoidance can be a part of a resume. Bubble groups can’t afford dangerous losses; neither USC crew, males or girls, has endured a very dangerous loss in January.
Each groups had been on the dangerous facet of the bubble to begin the month. Now they’re each properly contained in the minimize line. They aren’t dwelling free, however they’ve some margin for error. Crucially, their large wins (USC WBB over Stanford, MBB over UCLA) imply that the job over the subsequent a number of weeks is to not pile on extra big wins (although that might be nice), however to keep away from dangerous losses. If these two groups do keep away from a single really dangerous loss, they are going to be within the 2023 NCAA Match.
In case you’re questioning: The final time USC put each its girls’s and males’s basketball groups within the NCAA Match was 1997. USC is on the verge of constructing historical past.
The following month simply grew to become rather a lot simpler due to what the Trojans have executed over the previous month.
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