by Paul Teetor
The worst thing you could imagine happening to the USC women’s basketball team happened Monday night: superstar JuJu Watkins suffered a season-ending knee injury.
It’s now up to the UCLA women to bring an NCAA Championship home to LA.
That was the grim reality after Watkins suffered a torn ACL in the Trojans second round win over Mississippi State. An ACL tear typically takes a year to recover from.
It is a devastating blow for the Trojans, but they will just have to carry on without her as they advanced to the Sweet Sixteen despite her loss in the first quarter. There is no chance USC takes the title without Watkins, the best player in women’s college basketball now that Caitlin Clark is in the WNBA.
Title hopes for an LA team now rest with the Shaq-like post player Lauren Betts and UCLA.
While USC’s title hopes are finished, anything less than making the Final Four would be a grave disappointment for UCLA.
The men are done once again before we get to the good part of March Madness. Now it’s up to the women to make Los Angeles proud.
Prediction: UCLA will win the women’s tournament. For the Bruins it would be the first ever title for the women.
So get ready to watch history being made – and say a little prayer for Watkins to have a full and complete recovery.
Meanwhile the UCLA men’s team was two and through after Saturday night’s 67-58 loss to Tennessee in the second round of the NCAA Tournament. Their first-ever season in the Big 10 (the big 18, really, but who’s counting?) was suddenly over with nothing to show for it.
No Big Ten title, no deep run in the big dance, not even any individual honors. Nothing but memories of Head Coach Mick Cronin’s bizarre bi-polar approach to motivating his players – publicly mocking them as “soft” and “delusional” for most of the season before praising them to the max come tournament time.
As bad as that second round loss was for the most storied college program in the nation, it was certainly better than the USC men’s hoops program. The Trojan record was none and done. They didn’t even qualify for a taste of March Madness.
USC Coach Eric Musselman succeeded at only one thing: making former coach Andy Enfield look good by comparison. Enfield at least got the Trojans to the Elite Eight four years ago when Evan Mobley – now an NBA All-Star with the league-leading Cleveland Cavaliers – won the rare triple crown of Pac-12 Freshman of the Year, Player of the Year and Defensive Player of the Year.
Of course, that was back in the Dark Ages when both the Bruins and the Trojans were in the PAC-12 and both regularly made the NCAA Tournament. Those golden days are ancient history now that the entire college athletic landscape has been transformed by the revolving door known as the transfer portal and the Name, Image and Likeness policy which has poured NIL money into the player’s pockets – and made them hungry to sell themselves to the highest bidder.
The loss to Tennessee was a microcosm of UCLA’s season: looking like a team with real potential to do some serious damage at several points in the first half, then looking shockingly bad late in the first half and on into the second half.
For the first 15 minutes Saturday night, the Bruins went toe-to-toe with the Volunteers, the No. 2 seed in the Midwest Regional. The 7th seeded Bruins were slugging it out with the Vols in what was essentially a road game in Lexington, Kentucky, the heart of Southeastern Conference country.
It was 23-21 UCLA, after a 3-pointer by Trent Perry, the Bruin freshman who was a prize recruit this year from Harvard-Westlake High school. At that point it was a highly competitive game with UCLA looking like it had a real chance to pull off a major upset and advance to the Sweet 16.
But Tennessee outscored UCLA 11-2 in the final 3:46 of the first half, beating the Bruins to every loose ball, penetrating at will, and hitting almost all their shots while the Bruins missed all but one. The Vols then buried the Bruins early in the second half with a barrage of 3-pointers, many of them wide open. The final score of 67-58 was misleading because a late Bruins comeback was too little and definitely too late. All it did was disguise the thorough beatdown that this game was after the first 15 minutes.
The only bright spot was the emergence as a force to be reckoned with of Aday Mara, the 7-foot-3, 180-pound Spaniard who was a total bust last season because he couldn’t hold his position in the post and therefore couldn’t score buckets or grab rebounds.
This year he hit the weight room, packed on enough muscle that he no longer resembled a human toothpick, and became a real problem for other teams to deal with. But he rarely played more than 15 minutes per game and Cronin never did come up with a good explanation of why he was so reluctant to play him. Whether he returns or not will be a real barometer of how Cronin treats his players and how they react to his tough love.
In the end, Tennessee was moving on to the Sweet 16 in Indianapolis and the Bruin student-athletes – what a bad joke that phrase has become – were slinking back to Westwood.
They were trailed by legit questions about which of them – if any – would be back next year to grow and mature together, like the Tyger Campbell, Jaime Jacquez and Johnny Juzang UCLA team just three seasons ago.
And for Bruin fans who haven’t tracked their progress since then, Jacquez has become a key member of the Miami Heat, Juzang is a regular rotation player for the Utah Jazz, and Campbell is making good money playing in Europe.
Even the best coaches have to have talented players to work with, which raises legit questions about who will be back next year – and who Cronin wants back next year.
This year’s team was cobbled together mainly from the transfer portal.
Starting forward Kobe Johnson transferred across town last summer from USC. The other starting forward, Eric Dailey, transferred from Oklahoma State. Lazar Stefanovic came over from Utah in the summer of 2023. Junior William Kyle III came in last summer from South Dakota State. Junior Skyy Clark, an L.A. guy, played his freshman year at Illinois and his sophomore year at Louisville before coming home. Junior Tyler Bilodeau played two seasons at Oregon State before becoming UCLA’s leading scorer this season.
Whether any or all of them will be back next season is very much an open question. They could just as easily be replaced by a new bunch of players from the transfer portal.
It is a vastly different player-program environment, at once transient and transactional. It can’t be much fun for an emotional guy like Cronin who thrives on building relationships with his players.
Things have devolved so much in the college game that a school’s fans are rooting for laundry with numbers on the back. The fans hardly know the players who come and go quicker than hummingbirds looking for more sugar water.
That’s what college sports has become: rooting for laundry.
The new cheer: Our laundry is better than your laundry.
Contact: teetor.paul@gmail.com. ER
