Ruling Ends USC’s Hopes of Playing in Rainbow Classic

An Ohio judge’s decision Friday to uphold the NCAA’s “two-in-four” rule for the coming season officially ended the USC men’s basketball team’s hopes of playing in the Rainbow Classic in December, an event the Trojans had tentatively scheduled anticipating a favorable ruling.

USC officials, though, claim that they had pulled out of the three-day Hawaii holiday tournament well in advance of Judge Edmund A. Sargus Jr.’s ruling in favor of the NCAA.

Either way, the Trojans are looking to fill a one-game hole in their schedule for this season three months before practice begins.

“We’re basically set with the schedule and there are no worries,” USC senior associate athletic director Daryl Gross said. “It doesn’t matter if we play four years in a row in Hawaii or twice every four years.

“We’ve always been very comfortable with the two-in-four rule and I’m sure we’ll get a quality opponent for that last date.”

Cal State Northridge has been mentioned as a possible opponent and had been on USC’s tentative schedule earlier this summer.

A lawsuit by a coalition of exempt events--multi-game events that are counted as only one game toward a school’s maximum allowance of 28 games in a regular season--hoped to change the NCAA’s two-in-four rule, allowing teams to play in such affairs every season if they wanted, instead of two every four seasons.

The events’ promoters claimed that with a number of teams already having exhausted their exemptions over the last two years, the rule put their events in jeopardy of going out of business with a shortage of teams.

USC, for example, already has played in two such exempt events, the Yahoo Sports Invitational in 2000-01 and the Preseason NIT last season.

But Sargus wanted to see more evidence that events were in peril--such as some actually folding--before ruling that the rule violated antitrust laws.

Several schools had held spots open in their schedules waiting for the ruling and many tournaments are now scrambling to fill out their fields.

USC’s tentative schedule includes nonconference games against Missouri, which reached the Elite Eight last season, in the Wooden Classic on Dec. 7, Ivy League champion Pennsylvania on Jan. 11 at the Forum and at Mountain West Conference tournament runner-up Nevada Las Vegas on Feb. 9.