Big Ten Basketball: Ranking all 18 programs after adding Oregon, UCLA, USC, and Washington

8. USC

It’s never easy to transition into a new conference, even if you’re one of the best teams in the league from the start. USC has been in phenomenal shape in recent years, and continues to achieve basketball success even now that they’ve run out of Mobley brothers.

Andy Enfield was hired back in 2013 and has made five trips to the NCAA Tournament, including each of the last three. USC certainly benefits from a weak Pac-12, but have gone 43-17 in league play since the start of the pandemic and advanced all the way to the Elite Eight back in 2021. There’s been a lot of good in recent years and even more talented recruits are heading to Los Angeles.

Much like with the other Pac-12 schools we’ve mentioned, we’ll have to take an initial pause because of the major changes of a new league. Not only are the Trojans replacing the likes of California and Stanford with Indiana and Purdue, they’re also traveling basically across the country for every road game with their new league members. This may not seem important, but the uptick in travel and strength of opponents will be a legitimate concern.

All things aside, USC is in great shape under Enfield’s leadership, with him showing success as a recruiter and basketball coach. The Trojans have quite frankly had a better last three seasons than almost the entire Big Ten, with a few exceptions of course. It’ll be really weird to have USC in the Big Ten, but them finishing regularly in the top half of the league should not be a weird thing to see.