INDIANAPOLIS – USC defeated No. 3 seed Kansas 85-51 on Monday night to reach the Sweet 16 of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament – and in doing so gave the Jayhawks the third worst loss in the program’s history.
Before Monday’s game, Kansas suffered just eight 30-point losses in the program’s history, the most recent being a 72-40 loss to Kentucky in 2014.
“This is the worst we can play,” said Kansas coach Bill Self. “And I’m sure [USC coach] Andy [Enfield] I would say that it is certainly one of his best games. It was a bad combination for all of us. “
One of the traditional college basketball programs, the Jayhawks had played nearly 3,200 games without ever setting foot on the ground at Hinkle Fieldhouse – the iconic basketball cathedral made famous by the Hollywood film “Hoosiers”. they will not be anxious to return.
Kansas missed its first eight shots, most of them open-looking, and never led during the game. The Jayhawks’ highest unanswered score was just five points.
“I think their length obviously bothered us, but our shot selection was poor,” said Self. “You know we haven’t been a great pitch selection team all year, and tonight, it seemed to me that when we got a little bit faster and didn’t run, we made some very marginal pitches.”
Kansas could do nothing in the attack, no matter what the USC showed defensively. Kansas was particularly bad against the area, hitting 7 out of 30 from the field for 21 points.
The Jayhawks’ 51 points were the lowest in an NCAA tournament game since placing 49 against Ohio in the round of 64 in 1985 (a game Kansas won 49-38).
Offensively, the USC could not go wrong. The sixth sown Trojans scored 11 out of 18 points out of 3 and 13 out of 24 overall out of paint on Monday.
Kansas was 6 out of 34 out of the painting. In contested pitches, USC was 22 out of 39, including 6 out of 7 in the 3-point range for a total of 50 points.
Kansas senior guard Marcus Garrett summed things up very succinctly: “I feel like I failed today. We kind of chose the wrong day to not make any shots, and the other team was doing everything they shot.”
Self said he felt there was “probably less room for error in this team than in any other team since I trained here”.
“I think our players have maximized their skills very well, but our margin of error was small,” he continued. “When we play in a way that the ball gets stuck or we become one-on-one players or whatever, we don’t really play together, we don’t help each other, we become very average or even poor, as we were tonight .
“I think we learned that there is a certain way to play. If you play like that, we can be very successful. But if we don’t do that, we get average or below average very fast. It was a team in January. When we stayed behind and stayed behind frustrated, we just didn’t have enough energy to put together anything to make the game. “
Kansas’ worst previous defeat in the NCAA tournament was an 18 point loss to Indiana in the 1940 national championship, when Phog Allen was the coach of the Jayhawks.
The next USC faces Oregon with third place in Sweet 16 on Sunday. It will be the first meeting between the Pac-12 teams in the history of the NCAA tournament
ESPN Stats & Information and The Associated Press contributed to this report.