No. 4 Cardinal Women Rout No. 8 UCLA, USC Men Swat Stanford

by Scott Allen on Jan 21, 2026 11:04 AM PST

Alex Stepheson rejects Stanford's Josh Owens during last night's game.

Names and rankings don't seem to matter to the Stanford women's basketball team, especially at Maples Pavilion, where the Cardinal steamrolled another top-10 opponent last night. The latest victim, UCLA, arrived with a 15-1 record and left with a 64-38 loss that reaffirmed Stanford's Pac-10 dominance.

Kayla Pedersen finished with 18 points and 10 rebounds to lead the Cardinal, which built a 17-point halftime lead and put the game out of reach with a 16-4 run to start the second half.

Here's the scary part for Stanford's upcoming opponents: "I don't think today was our best game at all," Pedersen said after the game.

Thursday certainly wasn't the Stanford men's basketball team's best game. At all.

The Daily Trojan live-blogged last night's game and evoked another sport after USC put the finishing touches on its dominating win against Johnny Dawkins' predictably unpredictable squad.

"Live from the Galen Center, USC is a winner tonight 65-42 over the Jim Harbaugh-less Cardinal of Stanford."

(We'll soon know whether Stanford will be seeking redemption against the bowl-banned Trojans of Troy in the teams' second meeting at Maples Pavilion.)

The offensive genius of Harbaugh and Greg Roman might not have been enough to rescue Stanford last night from its worst offensive performance in five years. The Cardinal shot 22 percent from the floor and Jeremy Green was limited to five points, his lowest output of the season. As the Daily Axe succintly put it, the Cardinal needs to start scoring.

Dawkins said his team had some good looks and I'll have to take his word for it, as the game wasn't televised. Good looks or not, the results were alarmingly poor. Stanford returns to action on Saturday at UCLA. Expect them to shoot 60%.

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So does that make them the Pete Carroll-less Trojans of USC?

Can’t explain the USC-Stanford game, since I didn’t watch it. I did notice that the score seemed to be relatively closer at the half, though, so maybe Stanford just threw its arms up in the air and said, “Uncle!”

As for the women, wow, what an interesting game. The Bruins definitely were one of the strongest, if not the strongest defensive team that Stanford has played so far, and that includes UConn. Their full-court defense stymied many Stanford players throughout most of the game. Add in their steals and it looked like it could have been a really close game. The difference, though, was that UCLA had zero offense. I don’t think they scored a FG until nine minutes into the second half. The other two points scored up to then were off of 2-4 FTs. No layups, no jumpshots, no FTs, nothing. They really could have made Stanford sweat if they just made their shots.

I think I heard that Stanford has beaten the past three top-10 teams by a combined 75 points or something like that. Granted all three wins were at home, but still, that’s impressive.

by RedOscar on Jan 21, 2026 12:19 PM PST reply actions

Lucky losses?

Wow, what a difference in the women’s team after only a month. This almost makes me thankful for the losses against DePaul and Tennessee. I think they woke the team up a little bit. Hoping this upward trend continues…

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