Six prestigious showcases and two late-season matchups with defending national champion UCLA highlight a loaded 2026-27 schedule for the USC women’s basketball team.
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The Players Era Showcase, which is expected to have a seven-figure NIL pool, is the highlight of the nonconference season.
Six teams are slated to participate – USC, Duke, South Carolina, Texas, Notre Dame and UCLA. All of those teams, except for UCLA, are expected to be Top 25 teams in the coming season.
USC starts the showcase on Dec. 19 against Notre Dame and plays Duke the next day.
The Trojans’ two crosstown rivalry Big Ten games with UCLA are slated for Feb. 7 and Feb. 25, the latter of which is the penultimate game of the regular season.
After sitting out last season while her torn ACL healed, JuJu Watkins, expected to be a top pick in the 2027 WNBA Draft, returns to take the court with National Freshman of the Year Jazzy Davidson and top-ranked national recruit Saniyah Hall.
The Trojans host Cal – where head coach Lindsay Gottlieb previously coached – in an Oct. 25 exhibition game before diving into the nonconference season.
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The TNT Hall of Fame Series in Las Vegas is first up, and USC will play UNLV as part of a four-team showcase on Nov. 2. Next comes The Real SC, an NCAA Tournament rematch between USC and South Carolina, on Nov. 15 in Greenville, S.C.
The Trojans will play Baylor, which was a No. 6 seed in last season’s NCAA Tournament, in an 8 p.m. game at the Intuit Dome on Nov. 20, then head to the Bahamas for the Baha Mar Hoops Nassau Championship.
That tournament features a field of six teams, and USC begins the event Nov. 27 against Saint Joseph’s before playing Iowa State on Nov. 29.
USC squeezes in a Big Ten opener against Washington on Dec. 5 and two nonconference games against Grambling State and Youngstown State before taking on Miami on Dec. 16 at the Scripps Sports Women’s Basketball Showcase in Phoenix.
The Big Ten schedule highlights include a Jan. 30 game against Michigan, which has the No. 23 2026 signing class in the country, according to ESPN, and a Feb. 11 matchup with Iowa, which brought in sixth-ranked recruit McKenna Woliczko for this season.
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