LOS ANGELES – Just a couple minutes after the USC women’s basketball team erupted into pandemonium at their Selection Sunday watch party, freshly minted as a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament, murmurs flitted and eyebrows raised at another program tabbed in their bracket.
The No. 2 seed in the Portland 3 regional, USC’s division? Ohio State. The game where it all began, USC beating a preseason seventh-ranked Buckeyes program in Las Vegas in November to kick off the season, JuJu Watkins dropping 32 points in her Trojans debut.
“I kinda overheard the announcer saying – cause they seen that we were the one seed and they were the two seed – we can potentially play each other,” USC center Rayah Marshall said Sunday, of Ohio State. “And they were saying, they should have a chip on their shoulder.”
“But I mean, same thing for us,” Marshall added. “Before we even played Ohio State, we were ranked under them. We were the underdogs. We still got that chip, and hunger, on our shoulder for whatever opponent we face.”
For three years, under head coach Lindsay Gottlieb, USC has been punching upwards. Suddenly, after a run through the Pac-12 Tournament toppling UCLA and Stanford, they’ve been tabbed as prom queens of the Big Dance, arriving wholly ahead of schedule in Watkins’ freshman year. And entering the NCAA Tournament, USC’s largest philosophical challenge will come in re-framing program expectations, no longer scrappy upstarts of the Pac-12 but a national power who’s an underdog to precious few.
“Obviously, South Carolina’s had a year that’s sort of stood out amongst everybody else – they’re undefeated,” Gottlieb said March 5, referencing the 32-0 Gamecocks. “And then after that, there’s kind of a handful of teams that, we’re sort of in the same realm. And I think we’ve really worked our way and earned our way to be in that realm.”
On paper, USC’s path through that realm – which could put them on a…
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