The USC women’s basketball team rolled to a 71-39 win over Rutgers on Sunday at Galen Center.
The Trojans (13-9, 5-6 Big Ten) got off to a slow start, ending the first quarter trailing by three points. Rutgers (9-13, 1-10) held the lead until the 5:39 mark in the second quarter when Kara Dunn hit a pair of free throws. USC picked up its defensive pressure in the second quarter, which helped ignite its offense. The Trojans held a six-point lead at halftime and extended it during a second-half surge.
Dunn led USC with 18 points and six rebounds. Jazzy Davidson contributed 16 points, nine rebounds and five assists, while Kennedy Smith added 11 points and four assists. Laura Williams anchored the glass with 11 rebounds and Malia Samuels finished with seven points and four rebounds.
Imani Lester scored 11 points and grabbed six rebounds for Rutgers. Zachara Perkins recorded 12 points and four rebounds and Faith Blackstone added six points.
USC outscored Rutgers 23-8 in the third quarter and kept the pressure up in the fourth, outscoring the Scarlet Knights 19-8. The Trojans dominated the battle on the boards, 57-32. USC made the most of Rutgers’ 20 turnovers, scoring 21 points off the miscues.
USC will look to extend its two-game win streak at Northwestern (8-14, 2-9) at 6 p.m. on Thursday. The game will air on the Big Ten Network.
When Gary Patterson resigned as coach of Texas Christian in October 2021, midway through his 21st season with the Horned Frogs, the now-65-year old coach decided to take a step back and reevaluate where he and the college game were headed.
“I’d had a job since I was 9 years old,” Patterson said. “Just kind of wanted to take a break.”
For decades, football had been at the forefront of his and his family’s life, so much so that his wife joked she was merely his “mistress.” He wanted to spend time with her, with his grandkids. Plus, after a few seasons, he knew he’d be eligible for the College Football Hall of Fame, which was important to him.
Patterson ended up filling that time with football, anyway. He watched the game from afar, helping out as a consultant on staffs at Texas and Baylor, even working with Amazon Prime’s football coverage, just to score a subscription to Catapult, all along biding his time for the right opportunity to come along.
It came earlier this month, four years after his departure from Fort Worth, in the form of a text message from USC coach Lincoln Riley, whom he knew from their days coaching across from each other in the Big 12. The Trojans’ defensive coordinator, D’Anton Lynn, had left in late December for the same job at Penn State. Riley needed a replacement.
“He wasn’t going to jump back into this for anything,” Riley said Wednesday. “It had to be the right opportunity, the right kind of place, the right kind of setting. I know he knows and believe he’s found that.”
No one is more invested in that than USC’s head coach. Whether Patterson turns out to be the right fit at the right time for the Trojans may ultimately determine the trajectory of Riley’s future with the program. Patterson will be Riley’s third defensive coordinator in five seasons at USC.
“I think it’s an unbelievable hire by Lincoln,” said David Bailiff, who worked with Patterson at New Mexico and TCU. “For him not to be intimidated with Gary’s background, that all he wants to do is get USC better — a lot of coaches probably wouldn’t hire Gary because he’s been a head coach for so long.”
For Patterson, who never beat Riley in seven meetings while at TCU, it was a particularly ideal partnership.
“Any time that I was ever part of a team that had a great offense and scored a lot of points, we won a lot of ball games,” Patterson said.
Patterson, however, hasn’t been a full-time assistant since the turn of the 21st century. He last served as defensive coordinator under Dennis Franchione, who brought Patterson with him from New Mexico to TCU in 1998. He was promoted to head coach in 2000, when Franchione left for Alabama. A week later, across the country, USC hired Pete Carroll.
That’s how deeply entrenched Patterson was for more than two decades at TCU, where his tenure, by any measure, was a staggering success. Over 22 seasons, Patterson led the Horned Frogs to 181 wins and six conference titles. Throughout, defense remained his calling card. Five different times during his tenure, TCU finished No. 1 in the nation in yards allowed, as Big 12 offenses struggled for years to adjust to his multifaceted 4-2-5 scheme.
But by 2021, while Patterson’s TCU defense had largely remained strong, the luster of his long tenure in Fort Worth had faded. The bottom fell out that fall, as the Horned Frogs started the season 3-5. Informed that he wouldn’t be back the following season, Patterson instead resigned with four games left.
Now he returns not as a head coach, but as a coordinator, a step down that Patterson seemed just fine with when asked Wednesday.
“I love it, to be honest with you,” Patterson said.
The entire landscape of college football has also been turned on its head since Patterson last coached, with the advent of revenue sharing and the rise of the transfer portal. But he didn’t seem all that concerned by those changes Wednesday. Mostly because he doesn’t expect it to affect what USC is asking him to do.
Trojans fans hope Gary Patterson’s hire leads to more of this, when three USC players brought down a Northwestern running back last season.
(Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times)
“My job is defense,” Patterson said. “I don’t deal with NIL. I don’t deal with all those different things.”
His reputation as a mastermind on the defense certainly precedes him, and at USC, that’s where he’ll be needed most. Bailiff, who worked with Patterson at New Mexico and served as his first defensive coordinator at TCU, said that hisability to diagnose what a defense needs is “superior from any person I’ve ever seen.”
His signature 4-2-5 defense was designed, in part, to allow for such adaptability. With five defensive backs on the field most of the time, Patterson’s scheme is intended to adjust to any offense, allowing for his defense to limit substitutions and match up against most personnel groupings.
That scheme, after four years away from the game, is likely to be different by the time it’s installed at USC. Patterson said he plans to marry his original 4-2-5 at TCU with concepts he learned at Texas and Baylor. He also plans to integrate some of what USC’s defense was already doing, with most of the assistants from last season expected to remain on staff.
“Instead of just coming in and saying, well, ‘This is how we’re going to do it,’” Patterson said, “it’s been a little bit more work of trying to put it all together.”
It’ll be up to Patterson to put it all together on USC’s defense, which in four seasons under Riley, has never put things together for long.
“Hopefully,” he said, “[I can] be that last piece to help SC get over the bar, get into the playoffs, to bring out a championship.”
Entering a particularly consequential season for coach Lincoln Riley at USC, a brutal Big Ten slate won’t cut the Trojans or their coach any slack in 2026.
That much was clear long before the Big Ten officially released its schedule for next season Tuesday. USC already knew it would face the conference’s top three teams from a season ago (Indiana, Ohio State and Oregon). But the official unveiling of the slate would further solidify just how grueling the climb could be for USC next season.
Oregon will face Portland State, an FCS team, a week before coming to USC on Sept. 26. Ohio State will have a bye week before its Halloween meeting with USC at the Coliseum, and so will the defending champ, Indiana, which USC will face in Bloomington on Nov. 14.
The Trojans will assuredly have to win at least one of those games to maintain their hopes of making the College Football Playoff in Riley’s fifth season. The rest of the schedule is hardly a cakewalk too, with trips to Rutgers (Sept. 19), Penn State (Oct. 10) and Wisconsin (Oct. 24).
The nonconference schedule is still being finalized, after talks broke down between USC and Notre Dame over the future of their rivalry series. But with two byes already baked into the Trojans’ schedule, a person familiar with the situation but not authorized to speak publicly told The Times that USC plans to schedule its season opener during Week Zero, with a home game on Aug. 29.
That timing drastically cuts down USC’s options for finding a fill-in opponent to open the season against at the Coliseum.
In order to play in Week Zero in its home stadium and not internationally or at a neutral site, USC must secure an exemption from the NCAA. That probably limits the Trojans to a team that faces Hawaii in 2026 — and thus gets an exemption from the NCAA to play an additional game — or means playing a Football Championship Series team, which USC has notably never done.
Starting the season early will allow for USC to add an extra bye week, while most Big Ten schools are working with just one during their 2026 slates. It’ll need that break considering what the latter half of the season holds.
After kicking off in late August, USC opens the season with home games in five of its first six weeks. But after that, the Trojans return home just twice the rest of the season, for matchups against Ohio State on Oct. 31 and Maryland on Nov. 21.
