This is how you know something big has happened, and that the game has changed for USC women’s basketball.
The Trojans are now a projected NCAA Tournament team after taking down No. 2 Stanford and dealing the Cardinal their second loss of the season. Stanford’s only other loss was to No. 1 South Carolina, the defending national champion.
All jokes aside about Stanford being unable to beat USC — either the one in Columbia, South Carolina, or the one in Los Angeles — the Trojans did vault past a lot of bubble teams and moved into the field with a win over a projected No. 1 seed. Stanford is still a No. 1 seed and would need to lose at least one more game, probably two, to risk losing that seeding position.
Beating a No. 1 seed is as good a bubble win as it gets. USC’s projection as an NCAA Tournament team, which you will see below from an ESPN bracketologist, is not an overreaction to the win over Stanford.
The other really good sign for USC’s NCAA tourney prospects: The Pac-12 is so deep in women’s basketball that USC will have other chances to notch high-value wins and keep moving up the board. As long as the Trojans win the games they are supposed to win, merely picking off two or three more high-end wins should be enough to get them into the field.
Here’s the ESPN projection below, accompanied by a lot of other news items, statistics, notes, and team reactions: