Historic blowout: Kansas Jayhawks knocked out of NCAA Tournament by USC Trojans
Kansas’ stay in the NCAA bubble will be a short one.
The No. 6-seeded USC Trojans of the Pac-12 Conference rolled to a 19-point halftime lead en route to an historic 85-51 rout of the No. 3-seed Jayhawks in a second-round men’s NCAA Tournament West Regional game Monday night at Hinkle Fieldhouse in Indianapolis.
Coach Bill Self’s Jayhawks, who finished the season 21-9, return home from a week-long stay in Indiana feeling the pain of the program’s worst NCAA loss and worst overall loss in the coach’s 18 seasons at KU.
“That’s about as poor as we can play,” Self said after the 34-point defeat. KU’s previous worst NCAA tourney loss was by 18 points to Indiana in the 1940 championship game in Kansas City.
The previous worst loss in any game in the Self era was a 32-point decision to Kentucky during the 2013-14 season.
“I’m sure Andy (Enfield, USC coach) would say that’s certainly one of their better games. It was a bad combination all the way for us,” Self added.
KU had so little success on both ends in falling behind by 19 points at halftime, it brought back memories of the Jayhawks’ winter slump that resulted in losses in four of five and five of seven games.
“This felt like today this was a team in January,” Self said. “When we got behind and got frustrated, we just didn’t have enough juice to put anything together to make it a game.”
The Jayhawks were torched by the Mobley brothers, Isaiah and Evan, during the first half. Isaiah scored 14 points and Evan seven as USC raced to a 40-21 lead. Seven-footer Evan finished with 10 points, 13 boards and five assists while 6-10 Isaiah had 17 points, eight boards and four assists.
KU, meanwhile, was way off target offensively, making only 29% of its shots on the night to USC’s 57.1% mark.
“Their length bothered us,” Self said. “Our shot selection was poor (KU hit 6 of 25 threes to USC’s 11 of 18). We have not been a great shot selection team all year long. Tonight it seemed to me when we got a little sped up we took some very marginal shots. Of the 25 we took I bet 10 to 15 were marginal at best.
“Playing a team like that, beating length … a team will stay in zone if you don’t make shots. You’ve got to make some shots, especially when you don’t have multiple big guys that can play inside.”
David McCormack, who returned from a COVID-19 and scored 22 points against Eastern Washington in a first-round win Saturday, had five points on 2-of-4 shooting and four boards in 22 minutes. Backup big Mitch Lightfoot had four points and two boards in 11 minutes.
“I go back and said, ‘What if we’d done this and that, maybe if we played Mitch and Dave together and played zone the whole game,’” Self said, discussing strategy. “I don’t know. It certainly wasn’t very good. Our 3-ball offense wasn’t very good but neither was our interior scoring as well.”
KU’s play against length was so spotty, a reporter during the postgame news conference asked what could be done to improve against tall frontcourts in the future.
“You can recruit. You can address it through recruiting,” Self said. “You can address it through player development. For us to be a team that really has a chance to be a national contender, I mean, we need to get a little bit more athletic. We need to get a little longer and bigger, those sorts of things.
“But I thought our guys for the most part played pretty well and maximized their individual abilities pretty well this year. But tonight, the length definitely mattered.”
Ochai Agbaji hit 3 of 13 shots and scored eight points, while Christian Braun was 2-of-9 shooting (1-of-6 from three) for five points. Tyon Grant-Foster came off the bench to score seven points in nine second-half minutes.
Jalen Wilson, who arrived in Indianapolis on Monday morning after a week-long COVID-19 quarantine, played just five minutes the first half and did not score. He had two points total in eight minutes. Marcus Garrett, who guarded 7-footer Evan Mobley at times, led KU with 15 points, seven the first half..
‘We got lucky the other night, and you guys know it. We were fortunate the other night,” he said referring to McCormack playing well despite being out more than a week after testing positive for COVID-19. “We tried to put a Band-Aid on it. This team down a starter, down a couple of starters, even if guys are actually playing in the game but don’t have rhythm and certainly hadn’t practiced, those sorts of things, that puts us in a situation where our margin of error is even smaller.”
Self concluded by saying: “It’s been difficult. I’m proud of our guys that we made it to the tournament. I’m proud of the guys that we were a 3 seed. I’m proud of the guys that we won a game in the tournament.
“I’m just not leaving out of here, nor are they, remotely proud about how we performed, prepared or got them ready tonight.”
This story was originally published March 22, 2021 at 10:53 PM.
