LOS ANGELES — Undermanned, undersized and underqualified.
You can chalk up the USC Trojans 2025-2026 men's basketball campaign to one outlier: Injuries.
Trojans head coach Eric Musselman has remarked on numerous occasions that Year Two under his management has been plagued by the lack of depth, primarily due to said injuries, with Rodney Rice, Amarion Dickerson, and now the newly banged-up Chad Baker-Mazara.
Musselman has scratched the injuries as an excuse for his team's results, and recent losses have expanded the importance of those missing pieces.
Wednesday night would be no different.
From the jump, USC would enter the Galen Center against the No.10 ranked Illinois Fighting Illini bruised and battered, playing yet another game without their leading scorer in Baker-Mazara, who was slated as day-to-day with a knee injury and freshman Alijah Arenas fighting an illness.
Mix that in with a poor performance all around from the rest of the Trojans on both ends of the floor, and the final score of 101-65 made sense.
“I didn’t think USC played well on either side of the ball,” Musselman said in his opening statement to the media in the postgame.
That's as flat an answer as you're going to get in terms of the Trojans performance.
Before player introductions, the Illini faithful came in bunches and painted the Galen Center a sea of orange and blue in the stands.
By the middle of the first half, it was an all-out home game for Illinois, and it knocked the Trojans completely out of rhythm.
Illinois led 54-32 at the half, and that first half would be etched in the record books as the most efficient Division 1 men's college basketball over the last 30 years, according to statistician Ken Pomeroy.
The Fighting Illini were displaying a full-out shooting barrage as a team, with a total of seven players putting up double-digit figures in the points category.
Junior guard Andrej Stojakovic led Illinois with 22 points on 6-7 shooting, and the Fighting Illini shot an impressive 52%.
The USC faithful had nothing to cheer about for 40 minutes and were eager to leave their seats once the final buzzer had rung.
Granted, some fans did leave by the middle of the second half.
This was one of those games that USC has to chalk up fast and immediately hit the drawing board once more.
USC was simply outmatched, which is worth being heavily noted, and Musselman was very keen on focusing on the Trojans' next matchup against the Oregon Ducks this Saturday.
