Whether you read the Orange County Register or The Athletic or any other publication for USC basketball coverage, the larger reality surrounding Trojan hoops is obvious before the 2021 season: Once again, a USC roster is comprised of many disparate parts. Outsiders will need to fit with insiders in a jigsaw puzzle arrangement.
When USC defeated UCLA, 54-52, on March 7 — the last game USC played in the 2020 college basketball season, but also the game which sealed a berth in the NCAA Tournament which was never subsequently played — the Trojans relied on this quintet for the vast majority of minutes: Onyeka Okongwu, Nick Rakocevic, Jonah Mathews, Daniel Utomi, and Ethan Anderson.
Of those five players, who all played 29 or more minutes against UCLA on that Saturday afternoon, only Anderson returns this season. Taking an approach similar to what he used for the 2019-2020 season, Andy Enfield is relying on a lineup partly built from the outside, not entirely from the inside. In other words, transfers are going to figure prominently in the development of the 2021 Trojans.
Enfield has recruited three graduate transfers — Santa Clara guard Tahj Eaddy, Wofford forward Chevez Goodwin, and Utah Valley forward Isaiah White — while also getting undergraduate transfers as well: Long Beach State’s Joshua Morgan and Rice guard Drew Peterson.
Much as Okongwu was the freshman centerpiece of the 2020 team, Evan Mobley will be the freshman at the center of the action for the 2021 USC team. For the second straight season, USC basketball enters a campaign with a minority of its roster consisting of returning players. Last summer, it was four returning players. This year? Three.
Enfield didn’t want Elijah Weaver to leave — Weaver transferred to Dayton — but USC’s head coach was ready to hit the transfer market and assemble pieces by using different avenues. The transfers-plus-freshmen-plus-returning-players formula, with the returning players not representing the majority group, won’t be foreign to Enfield. His go-round this past season gave him experience in juggling a roster with these components.
While it’s a bummer that USC won’t be able to test itself against Gonzaga and Kansas — as we noted at Trojans Wire earlier this month — the lack of Pac-12 basketball in November and December does give the Trojans one specific reason for optimism: The roster will have more time to work together, so that when it does hit the floor (presumably in a conference-game-only regular season), it will be more cohesive, more unified, more aware of how to create the five-as-one fluidity every team needs.
“This is going to be a fun and exciting team to coach because we have a lot of guys with something to prove,” Enfield told Seth Davis of The Athletic. “We’ve got a lot of new players, and our returning guys will be relied upon to do things that they weren’t relied upon to do last year.”
They will have more time to polish their skills, too.