USC is a football school. Accordingly, USC fans will drill very deep into football statistics and nuances. The football IQ of the USC fan base is second to none in college football.
The USC basketball fan base is a different story. People in the know are aware of how good a job Andy Enfield has done with the program, but the casual fan hasn’t really warmed to him — at least not to the extent that his results warrant.
There is still an underlying bed of skepticism toward Enfield among the wider community of Trojan fans (separate from the USC basketball diehards who really appreciate Enfield). To a certain extent, the skepticism is merited, but it’s only because building USC into a bigger and better basketball brand has necessarily required time.
This was never a quick-fix job. USC basketball has never been a quick-fix program, where a guy could come in and create a Final Four juggernaut in two or three seasons.
That’s what Kansas is. That’s what North Carolina is. That’s what a blue-blood program is.
USC has needed the past three seasons to establish itself as an NCAA Tournament program, a relevant program with a chance to become more impressive. Recruits such as Isaiah Collier needed to see proof of concept before they committed to the Trojans. If USC had been mucking around in the NIT the past few years, Collier and Arrinten Page and Vince Iwuchukwu probably wouldn’t have committed to the program.
Iwuchukwu went to USC because Enfield established a track record with big men: Onyeka Okongwu, then Evan and Isaiah Mobley. Getting to the NCAA Tournament with those big men showed that player development translated into results.
Recruits aren’t going to just come to USC — or an equivalent program — without seeing potential. The Trojans weren’t dominant the past few seasons, and the on-court product was still hard to watch at times, but the larger reality is that USC has transformed itself into an annual NCAA Tournament program under Enfield. That’s the proof of concept he needed to make the program more attractive.
Now we’re seeing the payoff of that improvement, modest though it might seem.
A few first-round exits at the NCAA Tournament might not seem like a big deal, but making the tournament and consistently finishing in the top four of the Pac-12 has meant something in elevating the program’s regional and national profile. These were not and are not empty achievements. Players notice that USC matters. It hasn’t mattered on the same scale as established powers such as UCLA and Arizona, but it matters enough that players think they can make a big impact and make a run at championships.
USC football expects to be great, and there’s never a question that the standards have to be high. At USC hoops, the standards shouldn’t be as high because there’s no history of football-level achievement. A lot of casual fans are right to expect elite performance in football; carrying that same attitude toward hoops just doesn’t work.
Patient, incremental growth in football? That’s not what USC fans should expect. Yet, that’s exactly what fans should be comfortable with for basketball, and that is what Andy Enfield has delivered. Only now are we seeing the program build a better, deeper roster with real potential to do something special. If USC does begin to achieve richly in hoops, we could sit here in 2028 or 2030 and revise our expectations for what Trojan basketball should achieve on a long-term basis.
Expectations for what the program should achieve in 2024 will — and should — be very high. This does not mean that USC has failed to meet expectations over the past several years. Those are two different conversations, part of a very complicated reality at Heritage Hall.
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