Eric Musselman is going sell you on USC men’s basketball

LOS ANGELES — The word began bubbling inside the Lombardi Recreation Center in Reno, Nevada, soon spilling out from all edges of the University of Nevada’s campus, a hub of high school has-beens given a sudden chance to change their lives.

This was the fall of 2016, long before the Muss Bus chugged on to stops in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and Los Angeles. This was new coach Eric Musselman’s first college town rebuild, and his most difficult: Nevada was coming off nine wins and three consecutive losing seasons. The Lawlor Events Center needed a spark, and so Musselman had an idea to draw in the student body.

He was going to pluck a kid – any ol’ kid – from Nevada’s lecture halls and drop them onto his new-look roster.

And thus, 50 kids showed up at Lawlor one fall day, veins pumping caffeine and Coors Light. They never had a shot at Division I hoops, and yet Nevada’s staff put them through a Division I workout. It was a massacre. Future financial analysts bent over on the sidelines and regurgitated their breakfasts.

They all perked up, though, when the Napoleonic head coach organizing this experiment came bounding down the steps. To this day, Nevada graduate David Cunningham, who stood among that group as a Wolf Pack hopeful, has never forgotten the words that followed.

“Look,” Musselman said, “I’m interested in bringing on a student to the team.”

“But I’m actually more interested,” he continued, “to hear if anyone can juggle.”

The kids traded glances, incredulous.

Musselman wasn’t manic. Well, maybe a little. He was his father’s son. Bill Musselman was revered throughout the NBA and college coaching ranks for his sheer sideline intensity and self-promotional ideals, and revered most of all by Musselman, who still turns mentally to his father – long after his death in 2000, at 59 years old – for guidance on sidelines and in meeting rooms.

For decades, Musselman has kept a pamphlet penned by Bill from his days coaching at Ashland College in the late 1960s, laying out a step-by-step instruction for running his one-of-a-kind Harlem Globetrotter-style pregame warmup. It turned a Division II program, in part, into the best show in Ohio: There were cheerleaders, and there was synchronized dribbling, and a unicyclist named “Crazy George.”

And there was juggling.

In his first college job, after a previous lifetime coaching the NBA’s Golden State Warriors and Sacramento Kings, Musselman wanted to honor his father. He wanted to put butts in seats, too. So he dusted off that pamphlet, and that day in Reno, he showed the group of college kids a clip of Bill Musselman’s Ashland warm-up. He needed players, Musselman explained, to juggle.

“Everyone was looking at him like he was crazy,” Cunningham remembered.

And then they scrambled to midcourt, lining up one by one to prove they could pull sword from stone, an incomprehensible scene as a horde of college kids tried to spiral a few basketballs in the air at a time.

Because Eric Musselman, like his father before him, could sell anything.

‘Selling your program’

Eight years later, Musselman was hired by USC to sell basketball at the Galen Center.

In late July, he sat for a conversation with the Southern California News Group in his office, a couple of months into his tenure. He did not stop moving, for two hours. One knee twisted over another, uncurled, twisted back again. Wiry fingers tap-tap-tapped on the glass table in front of him.

Musselman ran six miles that morning on the treadmill, as he does every morning, while simultaneously annotating a heap of news articles he’d printed out on a variety of college sports happenings.

He is 59 years old.

“It’s like something you’ve never seen before,” Trojans assistant coach Will Conroy said in the summer.

Musselman’s hire came at somewhat of a crossroads for USC’s program, desperately needing something it hadn’t seen before. For years, the Galen Center had ascended back to national relevancy under Andy Enfield’s longtime regime. For years, too, the Galen Center had seen rows upon rows of empty seats on January nights.

“We’re going to the Big Ten, and we need an elite home-court advantage,” USC athletic director Jen Cohen said in late April at an address announcing Musselman’s hire. “And Eric has proven that he can unite the student body.”

Young Musselman grew up the son of salesmen. His mother’s side of the family owned Pepsi plants. His father put on shows, when he coached. In Bill’s time coaching Minnesota men’s basketball in the 1970s, he’d take a fourth-grade Musselman to McDonalds and hand out a box of 30 Golden Gophers T-shirts to people standing in line for a Happy Meal.

It stuck with Musselman for decades. At Nevada, Musselman dressed up as a student and skateboarded around campus and held a kickoff event called “Arch Madness” in the middle of downtown Reno. At Arkansas, he developed a notoriety for ripping his shirt off after NCAA Tournament wins.

“I felt like he had almost an abnormal insight, or ability, to really utilize the media to his advantage,” said Kareem Moody, father of former Arkansas five-star guard Moses Moody.

On that Tuesday in July, though, Musselman’s office was still largely barren. Scraps of paper littered his desk, scribbled with notes, one reading “Team needs: Point guard, Center.” A largely empty bookcase perched in the corner.

“Andy didn’t leave me any books,” Musselman joked.

Enfield didn’t leave him any players, either, other than senior Harrison Hornery and walk-on JD Plough. Musselman spent his spring renting out a Manhattan Beach house with the rest of his coaching staff, each day a mess of calls trying to scrape together a roster from what was left of the transfer portal.

Even after rounding together a group, the work had only just begun, Musselman and staff assembling for a think-tank that Tuesday morning in his office: How can we can get the next group of young players excited about playing for USC?

His dad would know. Eventually, Musselman rose, retreating behind his desk and rummaging through a metal drawer into a file labeled “Bill Musselman Folder.” He came up with a stapled copy of that Ashland warm-up guide – and a manuscript of “33.9,” the book a young Bill Musselman penned in 1969 after authoring the nation’s top defense at Ashland.

The crown jewel is Chapter 13, titled “Selling Your Program.”

“Entertainment must be planned to help sell your program,” one section read. “Some people come to our games for the music by the pep band, the halftime show or to see our colorful warmup drill. Each person may come for a different reason.”

“The more reasons there are to attend a game, the bigger the crowds will be. Soon it will be the thing to do in the community.”

‘Put an address on it’

Back in Reno on that fall 2016 afternoon, 6-foot-4 David Cunningham smiled to himself as he watched a legion of hapless jugglers try their hand and fail.

Fate, strangely enough, had struck. Cunningham wasn’t “necessarily very good at basketball,” by his own admission. But he’d grown up tossing Cuties oranges to himself in his childhood kitchen. So he stepped to midcourt, and successfully kept three basketballs spinning in the air. A few minutes later, he knocked home a couple of 3-pointers during a scrimmage.

A day later, Musselman invited Cunningham to practice, and a kid who wasn’t necessarily very good at basketball became the Wolf Pack’s 15th man for four seasons.

“Totally jump-started everything that was to follow,” Cunningham remembered.

After an initial dose of skepticism from the rest of Nevada’s roster that first year, Musselman sold them on the warm-up, every player honing their roles for 10 minutes at the start of every practice.

We need to do something to get people to see you, he told them.

Soon, by the time Cunningham and others would run out to dribble and juggle, Lawlor Events Center would be packed 30 minutes before tip-off. Musselman set Lawlor’s three highest per-game attendance records in his first three seasons as Nevada’s coach.

After four years at Nevada and a Sweet 16 appearance, the Muss Bus rolled into Fayetteville. When he arrived, Musselman remembered, Kareem Moody – the father of the highly touted Arkansas prospect – told him he needed to make basketball in Arkansas “cool again.”

So Musselman brought the warm-up to the Razorbacks, too, and built Arkansas into a national power. By 2023, Arkansas season tickets had sold out for the season – in July.

But his final two seasons turned messy, at times, the first losing year of his career coming in 2023-24. And the same energy that made Arkansas cool again also spawned plenty of negative headlines in his time in Fayetteville.

Musselman was ejected twice after losses to Oklahoma. He screamed “Go (expletive) yourself” at a group of fans, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune, after a victory over San Diego State in 2022. An assistant tossed a reporter’s phone while recording video of Musselman after a loss in 2023.

“I think with every season, there’s these emotional times,” said former Arkansas assistant Gus Argenal, now in his second year as head coach at Cal State San Bernardino. “Like, yeah, I think Coach wears his heart on his sleeve. You’re gonna – I mean, you can see it, right?”

Musselman demands a lot from his assistants and players alike, those in his past affirm. But at USC, he’s assembled a roster of mid-major transfers and young kids who were specifically drawn to Musselman, knowing he would pull the most from them he possibly could.

“The parent’s side, what you’re going through at USC, it’s going to look different,” Kareem Moody told the Southern California News Group about Musselman. “It’s gonna be uncomfortable. He’s going to put his foot in his mouth sometimes. And he’s going to – definitely is going to – rub kids the wrong way.

“But I feel like, on the backside, if you can weather the storm, you’re better for it.”

In the midst of one intrasquad scrimmage on Oct. 8, as two teams of Trojans huddled, Musselman lit into a couple of freshmen on one bench, including Sierra Canyon product Isaiah Elohim: “Stop taking (bleeping) shots!”

Over the course of his career, Musselman has developed a mantra: “Put an address on it.” It means don’t generalize in criticism. If a player isn’t rebounding, Musselman will specifically call them out, rather than tell the group, “We need to rebound.”

They all like this. Mostly.

“I’m definitely not used to it,” Elohim said Thursday. “But I know that it will help.”

‘This is a new SC’

On that summer Tuesday in his office, Musselman barked for help from his computer.

Eventually, four assistants came scurrying in, gathering around his desktop as Musselman pulled up a clip of his warm-up at Nevada, then of his father’s at Ashland, the screen reflecting off his beaming eyes.

“Same thing,” Musselman points at his computer. “There’s the unicycle. Straight from that book.”

He can’t go straight from the book, though, in Southern California. He doesn’t want to. There was little other draw around at Nevada and Arkansas.

So what do you do at USC?

Musselman leaned back in his chair, smiling softly.

“We’re still trying to figure it out,” he said.

Step one, simply, was to build his roster. At USC, versatility reigns. They do not have a truly traditional point guard or a truly traditional center. Musselman is honest, and blunt with his own program, about this.

He has, however, intentionally loaded his program with an unlimited supply of 6-6 and 6-7 and 6-8 wings, from Xavier transfer Desmond Claude to lanky freshman Jalen Shelley to Northern Colorado import Saint Thomas. Things will look funky at times, Musselman readily admits.

Things will not, however, be boring.

“He wants (USC) to care about basketball, so he’s going to put a product on the floor that is fun to watch,” said Clippers assistant general manager Mark Hughes, formerly an assistant for Musselman with the Kings in 2006-07.

Step two is promotion. Musselman wants to win in every situation, son and assistant coach Michael Musselman said. That includes social media, where Musselman has over 160,000 Twitter followers and posts constantly.

“If we see something on social media, it’s like, ‘Why didn’t we think of that? Why aren’t we ahead of the curve?’” said Michael, who hopes to follow in the Musselman coaching footsteps and calls his dad “Coach Musselman.”

“‘Why aren’t we the best on social media? Why don’t we have the best tweet of the day?’”

Over the months that have followed, the grand designs of Musselman’s self-marketing vision unfurled across USC’s campus. He invited a slew of NBA players to the Galen Center for offseason workouts. He hosted members of Barstool Sports’ “Pardon My Take” podcast for a workout. He popped out at multiple USC fraternity houses on the Saturday of the Trojans’ home football opener in early September.

“Man, one thing about my coach, he good about pushing himself out and pushing out the team to let everybody know, like, ‘This is a new SC,’” Bowling Green transfer Rashaun Agee said in early October. “We’re not going to be the normal SC that y’all continue to see in the basketball world.”

This is what they came to USC to do, Michael says. Bring energy. Bring life, by any means possible. And that starts with the head coach.

“Like, I think that, it’s just something – can you be different and be good?” former assistant Argenal said, reflecting on Musselman’s approach.

To Eric Musselman, they are one and the same.