USC is popping up in several early Top 25 men’s basketball polls. Do people think Alijah Arenas is coming back?

The players metioned so far as potential incoming transfers sound underwhelming.

• USC baseball hosts Iowa this weekend, hoping to break its four-game losing streak. The good news is no USC athletic teams play UCLA this weekend.
• Makai Lemon is one of 16 players invited to attend the NFL Draft in Pittsburgh.

• USC women’s water polo player Emily Ausmus is the MPSF Player of the Year. USC coach Casey Moon was the conference coach of the year.
• Shocking that Jen Cohen’s State of Troy newsletter this week did not contain an update on the USC-Notre series.

• Have you seen of the stories this week about U.S. soccer star Christian Pulisic and his ex-girl friend, Alexa Melton? Did you know Melton is a former USC golfer?
• And now for some history:

• Former USC assistant coach Dave Levy is in the USC Hall of Fame and was John McKay’s right-hand man. But this is a story I like to tell sometimes because you never know who hasn’t heard it.

Levy was a member of the UCLA football team in 1953 and then in 1954 became a coach for the UCLA freshman football team. He was assigned a locker in the coaches’ lockeroom. It was right between the lockers of Red Sanders and John Wooden.

Sanders was by far the bigger star, winning the national championship in 1954 while Wooden was still nine years away from winning his first NCAA title.

• It was during this time that newspaper reporters would meet the local college football coaches at Scandia restaurant on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood on Mondays during the season. On some of those days, Sanders would skip practice because stayed at the restaurant all day drinking with the writers. It was no big deal to Levy and the other coaches, because they knew he might not make it back for practice on Scandia days.

• Norv Turner, the former head coach of the Commanders, Raiders and Chargers, was a USC assistant from 1976-84.

He’s always coached offense his entire career but for some reason in 1980, Turner coached the defensive backs at USC. There’s probably some good stories about what Turner thought coaching defensive backs and what the defensive backs thought of being coached by Turner.

But he had a pretty easy job considering the secondary featured Ronnie Lott, Dennis Smith, Joey Browner and Jeff Fisher.

Columist Nick Canepa of the San Diego Union-Tribune once asked Turner what he had to do to coach the unit?

“Every once in awhile, Joey would ask me a question,” Turner said.

By the way, Turner played at Oregon, just like McKay and former USC coach John Robinson.

• USC linebacker Dennis Johnson celebrates the Trojans clinching a Rose Bowl berth in 1979.

• USC president John Hubbard at the 1979 Cal game, his final football season as president. The year before, he got an unsportsmalike conduct penalty in a game at Hawaii because he was so upset with the officiating.

• This 1927 map from Paramount Studios showed what areas the state of California could double for during movies.

• Everyone thinks of CBS college basketball analyst Bill Raftery at his current age but here he is when he played college basketball at La Salle.

And he threw a no-hitter in college!

PICTURES OF THE WEEK

Valerie Leon

Barbara Bach