Ucla Basketball, USC Face Crosstown Showdown With NCAA Tourney Stakes High
The UCLA Bruins and USC Trojans will renew their crosstown rivalry Tuesday night in a matchup that could shift bubble positioning for both teams. The game matters now because it comes at the end of the regular season when every result alters NCAA Tournament projections.
Ucla Basketball: Development details
The Bruins (18-9, 10-6 Big Ten) host the Trojans (18-9, 7-9 Big Ten) at Pauley Pavilion on Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2026, with tipoff set for 11 p. m. ET and the national broadcast on FS1. Betting markets list UCLA as a 7. 5-point favorite with an over/under of 150. 5. UCLA arrives riding a three-game home winning streak, buoyed by a dramatic overtime victory in which Donovan Dent finished a coast-to-coast sequence in 4. 9 seconds to secure a 95-94 win and complete a 23-point comeback—the largest in school history.
Bracket implications are immediate: analyst Joe Lunardi's latest bracket projection placed UCLA among the last four teams projected to receive a first-round bye, while USC was listed among the first four teams out of the bracket. Those positions reflect recent form and will influence how the selection picture evolves pending Tuesday's result.
Context and escalation
USC enters the game having dropped three straight contests and suffering a late collapse in which the Trojans squandered a six-point lead in the final minute in a recent loss. Coach Eric Musselman acknowledged the team’s frustration, noting the emotional toll in the locker room and emphasizing the binary stakes: win and improve tournament standing; lose and slide into a much tougher spot.
The Trojans have shown a split personality between home and road. Five of USC's nine losses have come at the Galen Center, while their better performances have come away from Los Angeles, including a road victory at Wisconsin and a near-upset at Ohio State. The return of guard Chad Baker-Mazara—who scored 21 points in his first game back after nearly three weeks sidelined by a minor knee sprain—adds offensive lift to USC’s rotation.
UCLA’s late-season recalibration also included tactical shifts from coach Mick Cronin. Cronin mixed his starting lineup by inserting Skyy Clark alongside Dent and Trent Perry in a three-guard look and moving Tyler Bilodeau back to center in place of Xavier Booker. That adjustment coincided with Booker producing 16 points off the bench on an efficient stint, helping swing momentum toward the Bruins.
Immediate impact
The immediate beneficiaries of the outcome will be the teams’ NCAA Tournament profiles. A UCLA victory would reinforce its status as a team likely to avoid play-in jeopardy and preserve the cushion built by recent wins. Conversely, a USC triumph would flip the narrative for the Trojans and could move them closer to the field—an urgent need after being listed among the first four out in the latest bracket projection.
Players and fans will feel tangible consequences: seeding trajectories, the potential need to defend home-court advantages in remaining regular-season games, and the psychological momentum that accompanies either a sweep or collapse. Both programs also face nearly identical forthcoming tasks; the schedule will see the crosstown rivals play twice over a 12-day span to close the regular season, and each has a home game against Nebraska remaining.
Forward outlook
Key milestones are immediate and measurable. The teams meet on Feb. 24 at 11 p. m. ET on FS1; the result will be fed directly into bracket projections that already place UCLA on the fringe of a first-round bye and USC just outside the field. The two meetings over 12 days to finish the regular season create a compressed window in which both teams can alter their tournament fates.
What makes this notable is how quickly a single game can reshape seeding and selection chatter at this point in the calendar. With identical overall records (18-9) and clearly defined recent trends—UCLA’s dramatic comeback and tactical tweaks versus USC’s oscillating home form and the return of Baker-Mazara—the matchup offers specific, evidence-based signals about which program will enter postseason play with momentum.
Tuesday’s result will therefore determine not just a local bragging right but concrete movement in the NCAA Tournament picture in the days leading up to Selection Day.
