Could this afternoon’s visit to Haas Pavilion from the Trojans be USC coach Lindsay Gottlieb’s last visit to Berkeley?
Could also be the last chance I get to talk with her. In one of Coach Gottlieb’s early years at UC Santa Barbara, the Gauchos visited Fresno State, and by the time Coach left the team room to head for the bus, there was no one else left at the Save Mart Center. These days, she has NBA credentials, so there’s always a crowd of media and red tape following her.
The challenging part about keeping up with Coach G. is… keeping up with Coach G. She’s usually running somewhere — like to the bus or to Cleveland — and she speaks accordingly. Full of ideas, and short on time. That was fun when I could do it, but during one of her post-game conferences at Cal, I got caught with my hand up, and nothing to say.
I don’t know how long USC and UCLA are committed to the Big 10, but they’re gonna hate the forthcoming road trips.
Suppose Stanford gets one of the byes into the quarterfinals. That leaves one quarterfinal bye, and two first-round byes up for grabs, and five teams in contention. USC is on the outside looking in, but their last three are all games they can win: at Cal and hosting the Washingtons (though if I got longshot odds on Washington St. winning the tournament, I’d think about it).
They play such tough defense, it’s easy to root for the Trojans to find two people who’ll score a lot, or seven people who’ll score a little. In any event, I think the Trojans would benefit from a confident facade. They look like a team that can win games 30-28, and even if they were just pretending to look confident about scoring 30, I think that would serve them very well.