Little about the first month of his first season at USC had gone as Eric Musselman hoped. His USC offense had struggled to score. His defense struggled to get stops. And on the glass, only a few of college basketball’s 355 teams had been worse than the Trojans, who struggled with dispatching the likes of Grambling and Texas Arlington.
But after stumbling its way through the first eight games of the Muss era, here was a chance, in its Big Ten debut, for USC to stem the tide of those early-season struggles.