REVENGE FACTOR
USC eyes Sweet 16 rematch against Pac-12 rival Oregon with extra motivation
USC did ample celebrating of its stunning blowout win over Kansas in the NCAA Tournament on Monday night.
Bouncing around the locker room splashing water bottles on each other. Recording the requisite dancing videos. Isaiah Mobley teasingly approaching and moving back from the big bracket in the hotel lobby before carefully placing “Southern California” onto the Sweet 16.
Waiting there will be a familiar opponent in Pac-12 rival Oregon.
The Trojans and Ducks are known as fierce rivals on the gridiron, both fighting for conference supremacy in football. But despite professed mutual respect in men’s basketball, USC is still holding a slight grudge from earlier in the season.
Sixth-seeded USC and seventh-seeded Oregon finished essentially even in the Pac-12 standings, with the Trojans finishing the regular season 15-5 and the Ducks 14-4. Due to Oregon having a slightly higher winning percentage, it was crowned the regular-season conference champion, despite USC’s convincing headto-head win over the Ducks in February.
Those are the rules the conference and its members agreed to prior to the season when game cancellations due to COVID-19 were a virtual certainty. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t some frustration on the Trojans’ part.
“I don’t want to say necessarily that they got lucky because they are a good team, but they stole the Pac-12 championship from us,” Mobley said following USC’s win over Kansas. “We both got chips against our shoulders because we beat them and they got
the championship from us. So I think it will be a great matchup.”
The fact that two Pac-12 teams are meeting so early in the NCAA Tournament is a point of confusion for USC coach Andy Enfield.
It certainly could be interpreted as another sign of disrespect for the conference as a whole, clumping the members in the bracket and not anticipating this scenario.
But it’s four Pac-12 teams that will make it one quarter of the Sweet 16, while no other conference has more than two representatives in the second weekend of the tournament.
“I’m not sure how we’re meeting them in the Sweet 16,” said Enfield, who dedicated Monday’s victory to his father, Bill, a high school basketball coach who died in September. “The good thing is one of the Pac-12 teams, either USC or Oregon, will be in the Elite Eight.”