Copyright Los Angeles Times
One month before the start of his second season as USC’s basketball coach, Eric Musselman stands at the edge of the Coliseum tunnel, dressed in full football uniform and helmet. When his moment arrives, the 5-foot-7 coach charges from the tunnel on cue, clad in full Trojan regalia, bursting with energy as if were gameday. “Let’s go! Let’s go!” he yells. Except, the stadium is empty. USC’s football team is on the road. Musselman takes off his helmet and looks around confused. And then, the camera cuts. The joke lands — even if his teenage daughter, Mariah, might disagree. The video does well on social media, too. And it’s aggregated online with headlines like “Muss Posts Another Hilarious Video”. It even gets Lincoln Riley’s attention. “Muss is great,” USCfootball coach Lincoln Riley said soon after. “He does some things I wish I could get myself to do.” Who knows if it will bring even one more fan to Galen Center when USC opens its season against San Luis Obispo Cal Poly on Monday. But Musselman, who has an entire library of similar Instagram clips, is pleased. After a debut season spent finding his bearings at USC, the fiery coach made it clear he felt he and his staff didn’t do enough to promote the Trojans basketball program. Average attendance at Galen Center fell to just over 5,000 per night last season, down from more than 6,000 in the final year of the Andy Enfield era. An inconsistent campaign and a 17-18 finish didn’t help. Winning, of course, is the simplest way to solve that problem. Musselman has made clear he understands that. But he has also been in L.A. long enough to understand that winning alone isn’t necessarily enough. Recent history certainly suggests as much. After mounting an Elite Eight run in the pandemic-affected 2020-2021 season, the two seasons that followed saw the Galen Center sit more than half-empty most nights. USC’s best average attendance over the past decade was actually in Enfield’s final season, even as the team skidded to a 15-18 finish. With that in mind, Musselman started making the videos. It’s also why he paid for matcha and free meals for students in late August — and got it on video — why he brought his team to Venice Beach for a practice in October — and recorded it — and why he’s hoping to schedule a dunk contest at one of USC’s fraternities this fall — which will most certainly be posted on social media. Musselman has implored players to play a part in marketing the program and themselves. When the team was invited to his house for a Halloween party last week, he urged the players to try and promote the team while they mingled with his Manhattan Beach neighbors. His staff, meanwhile, has spent hours handing out literal flyers on campus, hopeful that it will drum up interest. Not all coaches are so willing to put themselves out there. And sure, Musselman knows some people are probably rolling their eyes. But as he sees it, this is a part of the job. And it’s a part Musselman is particularly well suited to play. “It’s not a traditional approach,” he said. “But we just can’t do things here that are traditional. We have to create uniqueness in our market. If you don’t want any fans, don’t do anything, just coach your team. If you want fans, you’ve gotta win — that’s number one. You’ve gotta have star players — that’s number two. Your style of play matters, that’s number three. And you’ve got to connect. I don’t see how you have unbelievable attendance unless you connect with the students. “That’s just my personal belief being here for a year. And this year, we are drastically different in how we’re trying to connect.” The subject of how to connect with basketball fans was a regular topic of conversation at the dinner table for Musselman growing up. Bill Musselman, a longtime coach in college and the pros, was a firm believer in the power of promotion. He felt that his teams had a duty to entertain. And as coach, it was his responsibility to market the team at all times. His dad loved to discuss, while coaching at Minnesota in the 1970s, how he turned the Golden Gophers from a team that couldn’t draw fans to one that sold out the adjacent hockey arena for overflow seating. “There was a heavy pride there,” Musselman said. Whenever his father took Eric out into public, he usually brought along a box of Minnesota t-shirts to hand out wherever they went. To his fourth-grader son, it was horrifying. But his father always told him the same thing. “It’s a walking billboard,” Musselman said. “That was his favorite phrase.” The lessons stuck with Musselman. At 23, after he took over as general manager of the Continental Basketball Assn.’s Rapid City Thrillers, he offered the use of a car to each of the team’s new players. The only catch was that they had to put a giant sticker of the Thrillers logo on the side door. Rapid City was where Musselman really honed his marketing chops. He flew in halftime entertainment, set up recurring bits during games and tried outlandish promotions. One, which poked fun at Michael Jordan’s gambling, was featured in USA Today and got the team in hot water with the NBA. But it all worked. Soon enough, Rapid City was selling out its arena. The crowds kept the franchise afloat. “This guy was always promoting something,” says Pat Hall, who owned the Thrillers. “He’s the only guy I know who could get more attendance out of raising the price of hot dogs.” The formula worked elsewhere, too. As a coach in the United States Basketball League, a summer hoops league founded in 1985, Musselman’s Florida Sharks broke attendance records — a fact Musselman knew because he was keeping close track. “No one even came close,” he says. The same success in selling a program followed him into the college ranks. At Nevada, three of his four seasons set average attendance records. After Musselman took Arkansas on an Elite Eight run in 2021, the program sold out season tickets for three straight seasons. The Razorbacks averaged more than 19,000 fans per game in his final two seasons. “Every place he’s coached, they fill the arena,” longtime assistant Todd Lee said. So it’s possible the same could be achieved at USC. But the Trojans program brings a unique set of challenges, from competition for attention in L.A. to crippling weekday traffic on the 110. This season, those challenges have been a major point of a daily discussion among USC’s staff. Every morning, they meet as part of a “think tank”. In those meetings, marketing “carries as much weight as anything else,” Musselman said. It’s from those meetings that plans have been hatched for finding USC basketball a new foothold in a market where it has historically struggled. But everyone involved understands that those plans will be futile if USC can’t find a way to win. Those efforts weren’t made any easier when five-star recruit Alijah Arenas seriously injured his knee. It was devastating, both on and off the court — Musselman saw Arenas, a local standout and son of a visible former NBA star, as the perfect player to promote the program, similar to how JuJu Watkins has promoted the women’s program. “That’s how this stuff gets rolling,” Musselman said. It’s still not clear if Arenas will play this season — or at all — at USC. And without him, USC doesn’t have an obvious star to step into the void. But when Musselman shot that video in the empty Coliseum, Arenas was with him. They even shot a few takes with Arenas saying a line. It was the sort of marketing effort Musselman demands from his players. Even if, in this case, Arenas’ part was cut in post. Last week, with the season drawing near, a crowd of frat brothers flooded onto the practice court at Galen Center. They were there for USC’s basketball practice at the personal request of Musselman, who in return insisted they join the team’s new student section on Monday. USC’s students, Musselman firmly believes, are central to building the program to its potential. In part because they don’t have to brave traffic. But also because he knows Galen Center needs an atmosphere and the campus needs to feel the buzz — and fraternities, he figures are a smart place to start for both. Which is how the boys of ZBT ended up here, shooting after practice alongside the players. One of them came in wearing a jersey of Chad Baker-Mazara, the Trojans’ redshirt senior transfer from Auburn. Musselman stopped practice when he spotted it. He instructed Baker-Mazara to immediately go take a picture. “I never saw one jersey of any of our players last year,” Musselman said. “I don’t even know how the guy got it.” For the coach, it was a positive that his program is pushing in the right direction. The question now is whether that effort will actually pay off. “I know it’s just 50 people in an arena of thousands,” Musselman said. “But that’s a small thing that happened today. “Baby steps.”
