Football season might be over at USC, and Trojan fans who invested a lot into the 2022 season might still be stung by the way that season ended in the Cotton Bowl versus Tulane. However, one tweet from a USC fan should pick everyone up in the land of Troy.
It was impossible to avoid noticing how much better USC men’s basketball looked on Saturday against Arizona State. A team that frankly looked like an NIT team for much of the season suddenly looked not only like an NCAA Tournament team, but also a really good NCAA Tournament team — a No. 4 or No. 3 seed — in a blowout of ASU.
The final score was 77-69, but USC led 77-53 with under five minutes left before basically turning in early and allowing the Sun Devils to score the final 16 points. The contest was a rout. USC overwhelmed an ASU team that had been very strong to that point.
The difference was Vince Iwuchukwu, who played just 14 minutes but scored 12 points and grabbed 5 rebounds in that short period of time. The 14 minutes were still modest as a total sum, but a lot more than the six minutes he played the previous week against Utah and the five minutes he played against Colorado.
The main point: We got to see what Iwuchukwu is capable of.
That leads us to this USC fan tweet which is worth a larger conversation:
USC will have top 10 teams in both football and basketball next season. That's the tweet. ✌️
— Jeff Mckay (@MckayJ) January 22, 2023
Let’s dive into this discussion, shall we?