In the wake of her worst loss in five seasons at USC, Lindsay Gottlieb turned on the film of the Trojans’ 34-point loss at UCLA last weekend and found herself even more enraged than she had been initially Saturday night. Looking back, her team’s lack of effort was troubling. In the days that followed, she reiterated that point over and over.
But three days later, the “hard lessons” the coach had hoped her team would take from that loss seemed to be forgotten in the final five minutes Tuesday against Oregon. What looked at one point like a surefire, get-right win over the Ducks leading into that final, fourth-quarter stretch descended instead into a disastrous 71-66 defeat that left Gottlieb shaking her head.