A Victory by Trojans Would Be Classic

USC has a basketball team ranked 15th in the country and a new on-campus arena in the planning. Dare we say it? USC is a basketball school.

The Wooden Classic is back at the Arrowhead Pond and USC is the highest ranked of the four teams. UCLA has more national titles. Georgia Tech has produced players like John Salley, Dennis Scott, Kenny Anderson and Stephon Marbury and went to the Final Four once in the 1990s with former coach Bobby Cremins. Utah has tradition, history and a recent Final Four appearance, as well as a coach, Rick Majerus, who is offered every available job after every season.

But it is the Trojans who will be the only undefeated team Saturday at the Pond. The Utes, USC’s opponent, will be here without Majerus, who is rehabilitating an injured knee. In Las Vegas. Majerus, college basketball’s bon vivant with the big appetite and big basketball mind, might be the only coach in the country who could get away with rehabilitating in Vegas and turning his team over to an assistant.

With Majerus absent, it is guaranteed that the USC-Utah game will be the undercard.

UCLA will play Georgia Tech, after all. UCLA just lost to Cal State Northridge, after all. At Pauley Pavilion. The Bruins got booed by the relatively few people who bothered to attend the game. It could get ugly in Westwood, just as it got ugly at USC during this debacle of a football season.

“You can’t argue perceptions,” USC senior center Brian Scalabrine says. “In the view of the public, USC is the football school and UCLA is the basketball school. So everything UCLA does in basketball, people pay attention to.”

But it seems USC is doing everything right in basketball.

“Coach [Henry] Bibby told us to practice like we are the 15th-best team in the country,” leading scorer Sam Clancy says.

And how does the 15th-best team in the country practice?

“I don’t know,” Clancy says. “We’ve never been No. 15 before.”

“That means,” Bibby says, “that you never take a day off. Teams in the top 15 never take a day off.”

Utah has been No. 15 before. So has Georgia Tech. And UCLA, of course.

But the Utes are missing their coach as well as some experience. Hanno Mottola, the star of last season, is gone.

Georgia Tech is missing its identity. Cremins took his bright white hair and his sudden inability to get the big New York recruits and went home. Cremins even apologized for leaving the cupboard so bare for his successor, Paul Hewitt. Hewitt is a cerebral young coach from Siena. Hardly anyone at the Pond Saturday will have a clue about which one is Hewitt.

And UCLA is missing, what? A coach who can figure out game-time strategy? Who can make parts into a team? Who can make Wooden proud? Who doesn’t need Kevin Malone to help recruit?

Bibby would not think of asking the Dodgers’ general manager to make recruiting calls. The Dodgers’ general manager probably wouldn’t take Bibby’s calls. Henry who?

But Bibby has gathered a collection of underappreciated overachievers who are learning to win.

“This is really a big game for us,” Scalabrine says. “We do have the least amount of basketball tradition of the schools involved. Anything affiliated with John Wooden, that’s a big deal. And we get the chance to play a good team on a Saturday afternoon with, hopefully, a lot of USC fans there who, hopefully, like what they see and come to our games at the Sports Arena.

“Utah has been a great team and if we do win the game, that will be a big win for us. People aren’t used to seeing us in the top 25. They’re used to seeing Utah. People probably won’t expect us to win.”

Indeed, if the Trojans lose, they will quickly disappear from the polls. “Yep,” Bibby says, “we’ll drop right out, and it will be a long time before we can get back in. That’s reality.”

“Obviously,” Scalabrine says, “there are more UCLA fans in college basketball than USC fans. There are probably more Utah fans or Georgia Tech fans. But you can’t erase 30 years of history, 10 national championships, with one or two seasons of a couple of guys at USC doing pretty well. Beating a top team like Utah, that would help solidify us as a top school too.”

This is a refreshing attitude, the idea that respect must be earned. Around the USC basketball offices, that’s the message. Nothing will be given. Don’t expect to be in the polls. Don’t expect Los Angeles to care. Don’t expect anything.

On the same weekend last January when the Trojans beat Arizona State and upset No. 2-ranked Arizona, when they had a seven-game winning streak and a huge victory over UCLA 10 days before, the Trojans lost one of their big inside bodies, Jarvis Turner, to a season-ending stress fracture and Clancy for all but the final four games, meaningless by then, because of a broken foot.

Fair? Maybe not, but there was no whining around USC last year and no sense of entitlement this year. Clancy and Turner are back. The Trojans have beaten Bradley, San Diego and Loyola Marymount so far. “Cupcakes,” Clancy calls them.

“This is the big time Saturday,” Clancy says.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com.

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Wooden Classic

* When: Saturday

* Where: Arrowhead Pond

* Matchups: UCLA (2-2) vs. Georgia Tech (3-1), noon; USC (3-0) vs. Utah (4-1), after Game 1.

PAST CLASSICS

* 1999: Stanford 67, Auburn 58;

Duke 81, USC 68

* 1998: Kansas 62, Pepperdine 55;

UCLA 69, Oklahoma State 66

* 1997: UCLA 69, New Mexico 58;

Stanford 76, Georgia 74

* 1996: Arizona 69, Utah 61;

Louisville 93, Louisiana State 87 (OT)

* 1995: Villanova 67, Purdue 50;

UCLA 73, Maryland 63

* 1994: Kansas 81, Massachusetts 75;

UCLA 82, Kentucky 81