Eric Musselman’s first two years at USC basketball have been difficult. In Year 1, he had to throw together a roster on the fly and was not in a position to succeed. In Year 2, he assembled a quality roster but watched it get devoured by injuries. In Year 3, Musselman has crafted a top-20-quality roster with Sweet 16 expectations. He knows he and his program have to rise to meet the high standard established by the Big Ten, which won the national title this past season with Michigan beating UConn in the final. He talked to USC athletics about the challenges posed to him in his first few seasons on the job.
“When I look back on my career, I wanted to follow in my dad’s footsteps by coaching in the NBA, coaching in college, and taking teams to NCAA tournaments. From that aspect, I feel like if he’s been watching us, he would be proud of what we’ve done thus far. But I know that we have a lot more to go,” Musselman said. “These three years at USC have been great. It’s been a great learning experience. I knew being the first USC men’s basketball coach to coach in the Big Ten would be challenging for the first two or three years. As a new program in a league that has historically been phenomenal with hall of fame coaches, I don’t think anyone on our staff thought that this was going to be easy. But that’s what you want. You want to go against the best and you want to be the best. So I think that the future for USC basketball is looking really good right now.
Advertisement
“We still have a lot of areas we have to improve in, but we felt like last year in year two, we were much better than where we were in year one. We’ve had some unfortunate injuries, but at one point, we were 18-6, which gets forgotten way too often. A team can’t overcome losing a player who averaged 20 points and six assists per game. You can maybe overcome it for eight or nine games, but no team in the country can lose a guy averaging 20 and 6 and not feel it at some point. This year, we feel like this is our best team. It’s a team that’s got size, depth, experience, and McDonald’s All-Americans on it, so I think we should be excited. But in our league, for instance, Illinois is bringing basically everybody back from a team that had the best offense in all of college basketball. I think that if you look over a 10-to-30 year period, the Big Ten is the premier conference for football and basketball.”
The Big Ten is once again loaded, but this time, USC appears ready to handle itself and make a deep run in March Madness.
Contact/Follow @TrojansWire on X (formerly Twitter) and like our page on Facebook to follow ongoing coverage of USC Trojans news, notes and opinion.
This article originally appeared on Trojans Wire: Eric Musselman knows USC basketball must meet Big Ten’s high standard
