To know the Cal Bears is to understand that the team's chances of winning on a given night live and die with the production of its superb backcourt of sophomore Allen Crabbe and junior Justin Cobbs. Together, the two combine to average 37.0 points per game, more than half of Cal’s team average of 71.0. Keep one, or both, in check and you have a good chance of ending the game with a win.

That didn’t happen on Saturday. The Bears dynamic duo hit their average on the nose. Along with some errant USC shooting, the Trojans finished on the wrong end of a 72-64 score to drop Kevin O’Neill’s crew to 6-9 on the season.

“It definitely hurts a lot,” said junior big man Dewayne Dedmon. “You want to protect your home court and win your conference games. [Now], we’ve got to take the positives from this game and take it on the road.”

Unlike many of their other losses, plenty went right for the Trojans.

USC gave the ball up only seven times on the night to Cal’s 12 to win the turnover battle for the second straight game, and controlled the glass en route to 13 offensive rebounds. Five of those came from Dewayne Dedmon as part of the junior big man’s best game of the year, a 10-point, 11-rebound, 4-block tour de force in just 23 minutes of play.

Defensively, the Trojans shut down a premier point guard for the third straight game, with Jio Fontan and Chass Bryan combining to hold Cobbs to a scant 10 points on 2-of-7 shooting, well below the Los Angeles native’s 16.1 PPG average. And, in keeping with the Trojans’ newfound constitution, USC refused to give up despite trailing for most of the game, never once letting the Bears’ lead reach double digits.

Put bluntly, a lot of what USC did was winning basketball.

They didn’t, of course, and the first place to look is the direction of Crabbe, the Pac-12’s leading scorer. On a night where Cal’s other starters shot a collective 10-of-25 from the field, Crabbe shot a scintillating 9-of-12 en route to 27 points on the night. Nothing the Trojans did worked, forcing a bewildered O’Neill to switch Fontan onto Crabbe in spite of the senior point guard giving up half a foot of height, but to no avail. It was a move borne out of desperation, and of a wing rotation that O’Neill has lost all faith in on the defensive end.

“We don't have good wing defenders,” he said. “We don't have a stopper at the wing. We have a stopper at the point, our bigs defend well inside, but we do not have wing defenders. Plain and simple. Nobody's stepped up into that role right now, and I don't see anyone stepping up into that role. It’s just not enough of a priority to our wing guys to get stops.”

Yet even with Crabbe shooting the lights out, the Trojans might have escaped had they not run into shooting problems on their own. The team that just two days ago hit more than half its shots from the field and more than 40 percent from beyond the arc ran cold, making just 40.9 percent from the field and a brutal 18 percent from three-point range on 2-of-11 shooting. Most embarrassing of all was the foul line, where USC missed 10 of its 18 shots on the evening.

Many of the shots were less ugly in practice than on paper, good looks that didn’t fall. But with Fontan and Eric Wise, the team’s two best scorers, combining to miss 17 of their 26 shots and most everyone else missing free throws, all of the good the Trojans did elsewhere was undermined by their collective inability to keep up with Crabbe, who at one point scored 11 straight Cal points to keep USC at arm’s length. It’s once again a case of close, but not close enough for the Trojans, in a season where progress has often been undermined by results

“I like the shots we're getting. I like the things we're doing. The things you want to do well, we're doing well,” O’Neill said. “But you have to make. At this level, you have to make shots and we’re not making them. When you shoot 40 percent from the field, 18 percent from three, and 44 percent on free throws, you deserve to lose."

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