USC basketball is under radar; Kevin O’Neill wants it to get over that

Kevin O’Neill has either the best sports job in America or the worst. He coaches USC men’s basketball.

He stood in a hallway Thursday night, minutes after his team had blown a game it had under control by frittering away a 15-point lead, and lost to Washington State. He was frustrated, angry, disappointed in his players’ efforts, probably disappointed in himself.

And he said the same thing his predecessor, Tim Floyd, had said three years earlier, early in his second season, standing in the same spot in the same hallway at the Galen Center, which had just opened.

“I’ve bounced around a lot,” O’Neill said, “I want to be here forever.”

This is a job with unusual contradictions.

It is Los Angeles, a major sports market in one of the best climates anywhere. USC is one of the great universities in the world. There is youth, vitality, energy everywhere he turns. He lives in a nearby condo and can walk to work. His team plays in a shiny, new arena, which is right across the street from campus and is perfect for a major college basketball program.

But it is Los Angeles, where traditions are honored and fall hard. USC basketball is not among those honored traditions. You fight your way to the front sports page through the Lakers and Dodgers and UCLA basketball, among others.

Also through USC football.

There is pressure on the USC football coach to win, and it is incredible pressure. He has the undivided attention of tweeters and bloggers and paparazzi. His life is people with microphones, tape recorders and notepads, as well as well-heeled alums with pats on the back. He has a chance to become a folk hero, as Pete Carroll did. He also has a chance to exit with an ulcer.

There is pressure on the USC basketball coach to be respectable, to create little spurts of expectation, to be competitive and to not get involved in anything, as Floyd did with the O.J. Mayo case, that might embarrass alums and, worse, affect football.

No basketball coach takes the USC job thinking about that, or giving in to its reality. Yet numbers and history tell an irrefutable story. The last USC outright men’s regular-season conference basketball championship was in 1961. That was in the coaching era of the aptly named Forrest Twogood, who went 111-104 and set the stage for Bob Boyd, who went 107-79 and posted the school’s best conference and overall records, 12-2 and 24-2.

That was in the 1970-71 season. Guess who was coaching across town then, and guess who administered those two losses? Guess who went to the NCAA tournament, and won, and guess who didn’t even get to go, because only the conference champion got in back then? Even when the Trojans were great, John Wooden and his Bruins were greater.

O’Neill is no wide-eyed kid. He is 52 and has been the head man at Marquette, Northwestern and Tennessee; even a year at Arizona as a fill-in during Lute Olson’s leave of absence. He had the Toronto Raptors job for one season and devised plays for Vince Carter. He has the right stuff to make the next long-term stand as USC’s coach.

The immediate negatives are that (1) USC is ineligible for postseason play this year, the result of self-imposed sanctions stemming from Mayo’s one season in the program; and (2) the top three players from a team that won the Pacific 10 Conference tournament last season left for the pros. If O’Neill had Daniel Hackett, Taj Gibson and DeMar DeRozan, he’d be in the heart of the Pac-10 regular-season race. In truth, the Pac-10 is so weak this year that he actually is, with a 3-3 record (11-7 overall) that puts the Trojans in the middle of a mediocre pack.

But Thursday night’s loss, combined with Thursday night’s UCLA victory over conference favorite Washington that will bring the Huskies to Galen Center tonight angry and motivated, was a killer -- and O’Neill knew it.

“We had to win all our home games,” he said. “This one was crucial. To be in the upper echelon of the Pac-10, we had to have this one.”

He will continue to practice his Trojans hard, because that’s what good coaches do. He will drive them to play great defense, because that’s what coaches who don’t have great offensive weapons do.

“We’ve been offensively challenged all season. We have no great shooter,” O’Neill said after the game. “But we do have a great defense, and that’s why tonight was so disappointing, because that let us down in the second half.”

Point guard Mike Gerrity is the fire in the belly of this team, but neither he nor replacement Donte Smith could stop Washington State’s 6-foot-1 freshman Reggie Moore.

“He sliced and diced us to death,” O’Neill said.

Marcus Johnson and Dwight Lewis are solid offensive threats, and Nikola Vucevic approaches each rebound personally. But the totality does not add up to championship material.

It was suggested to him that this looks more like a total construction job than simple rebuilding. His response used the word “demolish.”

So, for the foreseeable future, at least for the early part of what he wants to be a long stay at USC, the image of this veteran coach will not be that of man with clipboard and whistle, but of jackhammer and hard hat.

The general Trojans faithful won’t care a lot. O’Neill will.

bill.dwyre@latimes.com