LOS ANGELES — A whiteboard sat stationary Tuesday on the sideline of the upstairs practice court at the Galen Center, permanently smudged black and ugly from wear, separated into two simple columns.
“Turnovers,” read the left-hand side of the board, with subhead designations: “Gold,” and “Card,” short for “Cardinal.” “Offensive Rebs” read the right-hand side, with the same subheads. For weeks, since the midway point of the season, head coach Andy Enfield and USC’s coaching staff have wheeled this whiteboard out at practice, keeping track of total turnovers when players are split into two separate teams – “Gold” and “Cardinal” for competitive drills.
Across a trip to Arizona in late January, playing without primary ball-handlers Boogie Ellis and Isaiah Collier, USC coughed up the ball a total of 41 times in two games. An “alarming rate,” as Enfield put it Tuesday. So staff started adding a caveat to team-against-team drills in practice: Not only could you lose two points by giving up a basket, you could lose two points by turning the ball over.
“Then if you lose the game, whatever drill we’re in, then you have to run – well, it’s not really punishment,” Enfield cracked, part of an explanation when asked about punishment for turnover tallies. “It’s just extra wind sprints.”
The tallies, and wind sprints, have worked. Getting Collier and Ellis back has helped, too. USC has turned the ball over more than 10 times just once in its past five games; freshman Collier, in particular, has progressed leaps and bounds as a floor general and decision-maker.
Now, uh, for the other side of the board.
At the beginning of the month, after getting dominated on the glass by UCLA and Oregon, Enfield didn’t hold back on his bigs’ inability to rebound consistently – “they’re just not good defensive rebounders,” he said Feb. 1. And USC simply hasn’t improved since, despite making clear strides offensively and…
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