USC men’s basketball had a very rare, very hectic mid-December week. Considering that the Trojans played two games against nationally insignificant teams, it’s weird to contemplate what the program went through. Yet, this was a truly extraordinary period for USC hoops. How many times does a team add a player to the roster and reschedule a game in the middle of December? USC added Kam Woods as a midseason pickup, then rescheduled UC Santa Cruz after Brown University very necessarily backed out of its game because of the tragic shooting on its campus in Providence.
Los Angeles Times reporter Ryan Kartje went into USC’s process of rescheduling the game and getting Santa Cruz to fill the vacancy at the last minute:
“If coach Eric Musselman hoped to test his Trojans again before the new year, he and his USC staff had less than 24 hours to find a replacement,” Kartje wrote.
Kartje then continued:
“They first considered all the local schools, only to find that none would work. They looked into the teams facing local schools — and couldn’t find any there, either. They even looked at Hawaii’s schedule, since schools that face Hawaii receive an exemption to allow for an extra game. Only ‘a select few’ schools fit any of the criteria, one person inside the program told The Times. Those teams could make it work because they had faced a D-II or D-III team at some point during the season which didn’t count against its games limit. That also meant, in some cases, buying out their game contract with that school.
“’There are some Division I schools, we couldn’t get them to say yes, I don’t know why,’ Musselman said. ‘Because I thought it was a great opportunity for some Division I schools to, you know, get guaranteed money.””
It really was a race against the clock, and if it seems like it wasn’t that important, Musselman disagreed. He told Kartje he didn’t want an extremely long layoff before the start of the Big Ten schedule. It was very important for USC to get this game in, chiefly to integrate Kam Woods into the lineup and give him a chance to work off some rust after not playing any live hoops in the first month and a half of the season.
Playing the game was as important as winning it. An unexpectedly wild week at USC came to a satisfactory conclusion.
This article originally appeared on Trojans Wire: USC men’s basketball had to work quickly to schedule Santa Cruz
