JuJu Watkins will miss the rest of the NCAA tournament with an injury she sustained in USC’s second-round game against Mississippi State, the team announced late Monday night. ESPN’s Shams Charania reported that the sophomore guard tore her ACL in her right knee.
Watkins was carried off the floor by trainers just five minutes into Monday night’s game. To fans of Watkins, the sequence before the injury might have looked familiar. Her transition burst, and her rarer ability to change pace—to decelerate—make her one of the best players in college basketball. On a fast break in the first quarter, she seemed ready to bring both skills to bear against two defenders. But as the Bulldogs players caught up to her on the other end of the court, and as she tried to stop and swerve around them, Watkins fell and screamed in pain.
Mississippi State forward Chandler Prater bumped into Watkins as Watkins drove to the basket, though it seemed like incidental contact she was preparing to absorb before her knee gave out. A shocked USC home crowd still booed Prater and Mississippi State for long stretches. ESPN’s Holly Rowe reported that it “got ugly at the end” at the Galen Center. “In the handshake line just now, some words were exchanged and people really had to get in between the two teams and separate them,” she told Scott Van Pelt on SportsCenter. A video of the handshake line taken by the Washington Post‘s Ben Golliver shows USC staffers stepping in to hold back senior Rayah Marshall.
“The energy of that crowd and how sort of angry they were with the other team and how much fired up they were for our team is so much about what JuJu has given to this arena, to this program, to this city,” USC head coach Lindsay Gottlieb said after the game. Thanks to Watkins, the Trojans are a No. 1 seed for the second straight season, the first time since the 1983 and 1984 tournaments that USC has earned consecutive No. 1 seeds. With a 96-59 win over Mississippi State, USC advances to the Sweet 16, where they’ll play No. 5 Kansas State on Saturday.
In their All-American’s absence, the Trojans ran their offense through transfer center Kiki Iriafen, who put up 36 points on 16-of-22 shooting. (It wouldn’t be the first time Iriafen has come to the rescue in the second round.) Without Watkins, USC will prepare to lean more on Iriafen and their athletic pressure defense, which has been dominant all year, even when the offense has looked shaky. Playing without Watkins isn’t something the Trojans are used to: She played through small wrist and ankle injuries in the first round against UNC-Greensboro—“end of the season knick-knacks,” she called them in a postgame interview—but Watkins has enjoyed good health to this point in her college career, missing just one game with an illness as a freshman.
The biggest questions about USC entering the tournament concerned their overreliance on Watkins for scoring, but the team came up with some answers on the fly Monday night. They delighted the Galen Center crowd in the process: Marshall banked in a three at the buzzer before the half, and the bench mobbed her. When she checked out of the game, the crowd chanted her name. Iriafen also inspired some chants, and she deserved them for the way she got everything she wanted in the paint. The true limits of next-woman-up mentality might become clearer in the coming days. For now, it’s all USC can depend on.
