INDIANAPOLIS – USC defeated Kansas No. 85 in the Kansas standings, 85-51, on Monday night to reach Sweet 16 in the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament – and thus handed the Jayhawks a third the worst loss in program history.
Prior to Monday’s game, Kansas had suffered just eight 30-point losses in program history, the most recent being a 72-40 loss to Kentucky in 2014.
“He’s about as poor as we could play,” said Kansas coach Bill Self. “It simply came to our notice then [USC coach] Andy [Enfield] would say that this is definitely one of their best games. It was a bad combination for us. “
One of the richest programs in college basketball, the Jayhawks played nearly 3,200 games without ever setting foot on the floor of Hinkle Fieldhouse – the iconic cathedral of circles, famous for the Hollywood movie “Hoosiers”. they will not be eager to return.
Kansas missed the first eight shots, most open and never drove during the game. Jayhawks’ highest unanswered score was just five points.
“I think their length obviously bothered us, but our selection of photos was poor,” Self said. “You know we weren’t an excellent shot selection team all year, and tonight it seemed to me that when we accelerated and didn’t run, we took some very marginal photos.”
Kansas failed to offer anything, no matter what USC showed defensively. Kansas was particularly bad against the area, shooting 7 of 30 from the field for 21 points.
The Jayhawks’ 51 points were the fewest of them in an NCAA tournament game since they won 49 against Ohio in the 1985 round of 64 (a game Kansas won 49-38).
Offensively, USC could do nothing wrong. The sixth-grade Trojans made 11 of 18 triples and 13 of 24 overall off the paint on Monday.
Kansas had 6 of 34 out of the paint. In the contested photos, USC was 22 out of 39, including 6 out of 7 in the 3-point range for a total of 50 points.
Marcus Garrett, the senior Kansas guard, summed things up fairly succinctly: I chose a wrong day so as not to make any shots, and the other team was doing everything they shot “.
Self said he feels there is “less room for error on this team, probably, than any team I’ve had since I coached here.”
“I think our boys maximized their skills quite well, but our margin of error was small,” he continued. “When we play in a way that the ball stuck or we became individual players or not, we didn’t really play together, we helped each other, we became very ordinary or even poor, as we were in the evening. to stay.
“I think we’ve learned that there’s a certain way to play. If you play like that, we can be pretty successful. But if we don’t, we get a very fast average or below average speed. It was a team in January. When we got to track and we got frustrated, we just didn’t have enough juice to put something together to make it a game. “
The worst loss of the NCAA tournament in Kansas was an 18-point defeat against Indiana in the 1940 national championship, when Phog Allen was the Jayhawks coach.
USC faces Oregon in third place in the Sweet 16 ranking on Sunday. It will be the first meeting between Pac-12 teams in the history of the NCAA tournament
Statistics and information from ESPN and The Associated Press contributed to this report.