by Matt Harrington

PALO ALTO–The Stanford Cardinal (10-4) get set to face the USC Trojans (9-5) for their next game tonight in SoCal, the Trojans are a young team USC struggled in their first two games in Pac 12 play. They got beat by Utah (13-2) and Colorado (9-6). The Trojans just came off their first Pac 12 win they beat Cal (11-5) on Wednesday night 71-57. The Trojans are feeling pretty confident about themselves as a young team and USC is right about the level where Stanford is.

Then you get to the Big Game that’s the one the alumni and the players are all excited for, anytime you put Stanford and Cal (Wednesday night) in the same building (Haas Pavilion) you know it’s going to be a good night. Cal and Stanford that’s the rivalry, that’s the one that sells the tickets and Cal and Stanford their both right there in the polls for the Associated Press and Stanford has 20 votes outside of the top 25 and Cal got three.

Their both vying for national prominence and their both going to be on ESPN and it’s going to have a national spotlight so it’s going to be challenging for one of these two teams to get into the spotlight to try to move up higher into the top 25. The Cardinal who won four of their last five games, it could have been five straight wins because the Cardinal lost to UCLA (9-7) in double overtime over a missed free throw. It might made a bigger difference if they had Reid Travis back that would have been the difference and would have won that game hands down.

The Cardinal had the lead by 14 points in the late stages of that game and they just couldn’t put it away and it was still a game when you look at it and you flipped a coin they could have easily have come away with the win there. Its disheartening that they lost that game but it’s not a game you lose when you go into the locker room and the players say they were overwhelmed and say “oh we didn’t have a chance to win that one.”

Stanford head coach Johnny Dawkins can look at that game and say “we had this game in hand we didn’t close it out but we know we can win this game” the Bruins were not like facing an unbeatable foe. It gives you a little bit of confidence obviously losing to UCLA was something you never want to do but getting that close to a road win and getting that close to starting off that road trip and getting that close to beating that team you get the confidence “we can do this.”

Stanford has the confidence that their a good road team it was an eye opener for their first loss in the Pac 12 conference but it was also kind of a learning moment where the Cardinal say “we need to put teams away.” Some teams have not seen Pac 12 play and have no idea how tough this conference is. However every single game is going to be a battle, they got a healthy dose of that when Washington and UCLA went into overtime.

Matt Harrington covers the Stanford Cardinal on http://www.sportsradioservice.com listen to Matt’s podcast below