PORTLAND, Ore. -- The USC Trojans' first trip to the Sweet 16 since 1994 was fueled in large part by an Ivy League rule that coach Lindsay Gottlieb joked Friday was "the best rule in the history of rules."
Alongside standout freshman JuJu Watkins, three of USC's five starters -- guard Kayla Padilla (Penn), guard/forward McKenzie Forbes (Harvard) and forward Kaitlyn Davis (Columbia) -- are Ivy League veterans who exhausted their eligibility in the conference but had the ability to play elsewhere this season as grad transfers.
Uniquely among Division I conferences, the Ivy League's rules prohibit graduate students from participating in athletics. Although the conference approved a one-time waiver to the rule in 2021-22, allowing players whose senior year was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic to complete their careers as graduate students, that didn't carry forward for future classes also granted an extra year of eligibility by the NCAA.
As a result, 11 Ivy Leaguers played for new schools this season as grad transfers. Besides USC's trio, just one other former Ivy Leaguer (Davis' Columbia teammate Jaida Patrick at Miami) was a regular starter in a power conference, making the rule's benefit to the Trojans one of a kind. Forbes is USC's second-leading scorer this season at 14.0 PPG, while Padilla (8.0 PPG, 2.6 APG) and Davis (6.1 PPG, 5.7 RPG) are key role players.
Gottlieb, who played in the Ivy at Brown, understands why the rule exists.
"That's an Ivy League principle," she said Friday, a day before the top-seeded Trojans face Baylor in the regional 3 semifinal in Portland. "That league obviously maintains a different kind of philosophical barometer than anyone else.
"That's great for that league. Certainly these players have shown with an extra year, they have their Harvard degrees, Columbia degrees, Penn degrees. Now they have a year to experience something different."
In part, that something different is the NCAA tournament. Because Princeton has dominated the Ivy League tournament, winning each of the past three years, only Forbes -- with Gottlieb at Cal, back in 2018-19 before transferring to Harvard -- had participated in March Madness before this year.
"I look at all this as a blessing in disguise," said Padilla. "Like I think I had a pretty fulfilling career at Penn. I'm sure [the others] could say the same about their careers in the Ivy League.
"Not a lot of people can say they've had a great experience there at obviously a great academic school but now being able to come to a school where you get to be a No. 1 seed in the March Madness tournament and just have a really already great season so far. I think I've like really gotten the best of both worlds, both in terms of athletics and academics."
Despite that happy ending, both Davis and Forbes said they would support the Ivy League changing its rule. "I think the grad year should be allowed for Ivys," Forbes said. I don't really see why not."
Padilla said she probably would have finished her career at Penn were it allowed, while Forbes never really considered that hypothetical, knowing she would have to transfer to play this season.
Within that context, USC made sense for the transfers because of the combination of a top basketball team and strong graduate programs. All three players are enrolled in the school's masters program for entrepreneurship and innovation.
Gottlieb's Ivy League background may also have helped facilitate the transition.
"I could speak Ivy with them in these conversations and experiences," she said. "I also watched a lot of games, as a fan. I knew what these players could do. We didn't go to the portal and say we only want Ivy League players. We want players that can complement where we want to go.
"These skill sets they had were really useful. I saw they could do it at a high level no matter where they were playing before. I knew it really translated to the next level. They've shown that, obviously, in real time."
The Ivy League's policy won't affect as many players after next season, when the group of 2020-21 freshmen who got an extra season of eligibility head into their fifth year in college. Princeton's Kaitlyn Chen is the top player in ESPN's transfer rankings. Wherever Chen ends up, she'll be hoping to replicate the impact USC's Ivy League transfers have made this year.
"It is a cool story of what college basketball can be when players get the opportunity to experience everything," said Gottlieb. "For us, it has worked out well."