INDIANAPOLIS – USC defeated Kansas No. 3 seed 85-51 Monday night to reach the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament and, in doing so, gave the Jayhawks their third worst defeat of the history of the program.
Prior to Monday’s game, Kansas had suffered just eight 30-point losses in the program’s history, the most recent being a 72-40 loss to Kentucky in 2014.
“That’s almost as poor as we could play,” Kansas coach Bill Self said. “And I’m sure [USC coach] Andy [Enfield] I would say it is definitely one of his best games. For us it was a bad combination around us. “
One of the richest programs in college basketball tradition, the Jayhawks had played nearly 3,200 games without ever setting foot on the floor of Hinkle Fieldhouse, the iconic cathedral of hoops that made the Hollywood movie “Hoosiers” famous. they will not want to return.
Kansas missed its first eight shots, most of them open, and never led during the game. The Jayhawks ’best unanswered score was just five points.
“I think its duration obviously bothered us, but our selection of shots was poor,” Self said. “You know we haven’t been a great shooting selection team all year and tonight I felt like when we accelerated a bit and didn’t run, we made very marginal shots.”
Kansas failed to get anything offended, regardless of what USC proved defensively. Kansas was particularly bad against the zone, firing 7 of 30 from the field for 21 points.
The Jayhawks ’51 points were the poorest in an NCAA tournament game since they faced 49 against Ohio in the 1985 round of 64 (a game Kansas won 49-38).
Offensively, USC could do no harm. The sixth-place Trojans made 11 of 18 triples and 13 of 24 overall on Monday.
Kansas was 6 out of 34 out of the paint. In contested shots, USC was 22 of 39, including 6 of 7 from the 3-point range for a total of 50 points.
Marcus Garrett, Kansas senior guard, summed things up succinctly: “I feel like we fell short today. We chose the wrong day for not firing a shot and the other team was doing everything they shot.” .
Self said he felt there was “less room for error on this team probably than any other team we’ve had since I train here.”
“I think our guys maximized their ability pretty well, but our margin of error was small,” he continued. “When we played in a way that the ball got stuck or we became one-on-one players or not, we didn’t really play together, we didn’t help each other, we became very average or even poor, like we were tonight. .
“I think we’ve learned that there’s a way to play. If you play that way, we can be quite successful. But if we don’t, we’ll get an average or below average very quickly. That’s how a team was today. in January. When we got back and got frustrated, we didn’t have enough juice to gather anything to turn it into a game. “
The worst previous defeat of the Kansas NCAA tournament was an 18-point loss to Indiana in the 1940 national championship, when Phog Allen was the coach of the Jayhawks.
USC will face Sweet 16 in Oregon on Sunday for the third time. It will be the first meeting between Pac-12 teams in the history of the NCAA tournament.
ESPN Stats & Information and The Associated Press contributed to this report.