LOS ANGELES — Around this time four months ago Eric Musselman was contemplating his future. The USC job had just opened unexpectedly after Andy Enfield was poached away by SMU, leaving the 59-year-old with a perplexing decision: Remain in the SEC with Arkansas or return to a familiar spot in Southern California to take on a new challenge.
Musselman went with the latter. USC officially becomes a member of the Big Ten on Friday, and Musselman will be the one to lead the Trojans into a new era in the ever-changing landscape of college athletics.
“I had a great job at Arkansas, it’s one of the best basketball jobs in the country,” Musselman told CBS Sports. “We recognized we were leaving a great job with a great conference and commissioner. If we were going to leave the SEC, the only spot that made sense was the Big Ten. The landscape in where USC was headed, it made a lot of sense from a conference standpoint and the USC national brand, the academic piece, the uniqueness of being in L.A., there really aren’t many college campuses in big cities, metropolitan cities. … all of that stuff was super attractive when the job came open.”
Musselman’s ties to The Golden State run deep. He played college basketball at the University of San Diego in the mid-1980s and was also the head coach of the Golden State Warriors and the Sacramento Kings. Before Musselman jumped back into college coaching as an assistant at Arizona State in 2012, he was the head coach of the South Bay Lakers — formerly known as the Los Angeles D-Fenders — the G League affiliate of the Los Angeles Lakers.
It’s not every day that a coach leaves his job for one coveted job for another, but if there was any offseason to do it, this was it. SMU firing Rob Lanier in mid-March set off a chain reaction in the sport. Musselman leaving opened the door for the program to poach away John Calipari from Kentucky, which led to Mark Pope…
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