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INDIANAPOLIS – USC defeated No. 3 seed Kansas 85-51 on Monday night to reach the Sweet 16 in the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament – and thus handed the Jayhawks the third-worst loss in the history of the program.
Going into Monday’s game, Kansas had suffered just eight 30-point losses in program history, the most recent being a 72-40 loss to Kentucky in 2014.
“It’s about as bad as we could be playing,” Kansas coach Bill Self said. “And I’m sure [USC coach] Andy [Enfield] Looks like this is definitely one of their best games. It was a bad combination for us. “
One of the tradition-rich programs of college basketball, the Jayhawks had played nearly 3,200 games without ever setting foot on the floor of Hinkle Fieldhouse – the iconic cathedral of hoops made famous by the Hollywood movie “Hoosiers.” they won’t be eager to come back.
Kansas missed its first eight shots, most of which were wide open, and never led during the game. The Jayhawks’ biggest unanswered score was just five points.
“I think their length obviously bothered us, but our shot selection was bad,” Self said. “You know we haven’t been a great shot selection team all year, and tonight it seemed to me that when we sped up a little bit and didn’t execute, we got took very marginal hits. “
Kansas couldn’t get anything on offense, no matter what USC showed defensively. Kansas were particularly bad against the zone, shooting 7 of 30 from the field for 21 points.
The Jayhawks’ 51 points were their smallest in an NCAA tournament game since they put 49 against Ohio in the 1985 round of 16 (a game won by Kansas 49-38).
Offensively, USC couldn’t do anything wrong. The sixth-seeded Trojans achieved 11 of 18 3-pointers and 13 of 24 overall outside of the paint on Monday.
Kansas was 6 of 34 outside of the paint. On contested shots, USC was 22 of 39, including 6 of 7 3-pointers for a total of 50 points.
Kansas senior goaltender Marcus Garrett summed it up quite succinctly: “I just feel like we didn’t do it today. We kind of picked the wrong day so we didn’t shoot. , and the other team was doing whatever they shot. “
Self said he felt there was “probably less margin for error on this team than any other team we’ve had since I’ve been coaching here.”
“I think our guys maximized their capacity pretty well, but our margin for error was small,” he continued. “When we play in a way where the ball got stuck or we became one-on-one players or whatever, we haven’t really played together, we help each other, we have become very average, even poor, as we were tonight.
“I think we’ve learned that there is a certain way to play. If you play that way, we can be very successful. But if we don’t, we get a lower average or lower average very quickly. average. was a team in January. When we fell behind and got frustrated, we just didn’t have enough juice to put anything together to make it a game. “
Kansas’ previous worst loss in an NCAA tournament was an 18-point loss to Indiana at the 1940 National Championship, when Phog Allen coached the Jayhawks.
USC will then face third-seeded Oregon in the Sweet 16 on Sunday. It will be the first meeting between the Pac-12 teams in the history of the NCAA tournament
ESPN Stats & Information and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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