Notre Dame wins title with buzzer-beater
Fighting Irish beat Miss. State 61-58 on Arike Ogunbowale’s three-pointer
COLUMBUS, Ohio – She did it again.
This time with three seconds remaining, Arike Ogunbowale got the ball near the right wing off the inbound and hit a three-pointer to beat Mississippi State 61-58 and claim Notre Dame’s second national championship on Easter Sunday. The Fighting Irish had not won a title since 2001 — which also happened to be on April 1.
“I work for this in practice,” Ogunbowale said. “I practice late-game all the time.”
What made this extra special? It was Hall of Fame coach Muffet McGraw’s 800th win at Notre Dame.
And you probably thought the national championship wouldn’t live up the semifinals.
Simply impossible that a game could be as wild as those two semifinals —
both Notre Dame and Mississippi State won dramatic overtime games to get here.
But Sunday’s championship was just as crazy.
The Irish fought their way back from a 13-point halftime deficit to win.
Mississippi State had a comfortable
30-17 lead at halftime after outscoring Notre Dame 13-3 in the second quarter. It was a season low for points in a first half for Notre Dame. But the Irish regained composure offensively and went on a 16-1 run over the final six minutes of the third quarter to tie the score 41-41 heading into the fourth.
The run was led by Arike Ogunbowale, who scored the game-winner against UConn on Friday. After scoring two points on just 1-for-10 shooting in the first half, she scored eight points in those 10 minutes and finished with 18 points, including the game-winner again.
The fourth quarter was anybody’s game. The Bulldogs’ Roshunda Johnson, whose three-pointer in the semifinal sent MSU to overtime, hit a three with 1:54 remaining to give her team a
58-53 lead. Marina Mabrey quickly answered with her own three — Notre Dame’s first of the night. And then a Jackie Young jumper tied it 58-58 with
40.1 seconds left. Mississippi State’s 6-7 center Teaira McCowan fouled out with three seconds remaining. That’s when Young found Ogunbowale on the inbounds pass and she finished with another dagger for the win with 0.1 seconds remaining.
“I was thinking two nights in a row, I don’t know if this is going to go in,” said McGraw when asked her thoughts while the final shot was in the air. “But it’s Easter Sunday and all the Catholics were praying for us.”
Notre Dame had overcome so much adversity to fall in the title game. It played all season without All-American Brianna Turner, lost starting point guard Lili Thompson in December, and played most the year without rotation players Mychal Johnson and Mikayla Vaughn because all four of them tore their ACLs. McGraw, who was the only female head coach in this year’s Final Four, nearly changed her entire approach to the season to compensate, in- cluding practices, conditioning and overall philosophy. She made it work with just seven scholarship players.
Notre Dame had been to the championship game four other times in the previous seven years, falling short each time. But this version of Muffet McGraw’s squad refused to lose. They pulled off the biggest comeback in title game history.
Mississippi State coach Vic Schaefer warned his team before the game the only thing harder than knocking off UConn was beating the team that beat them. Mississippi State should know. They ended UConn’s 111-game winning streak in last year’s NCAA semifinal but fell short in the title game to South Carolina.
But with a core of four seniors back, a season that began with the highest of expectations ended short of reaching them.
Mississippi State was not able to become a national champion for the first time.
The score was tied five times during the fourth quarter.
Notre Dame tied it at 58 on a jumper with 45 seconds left.
The second-to-last occurrence happened with 5:35 left and the score tied at
51. But McCowan secured an offensive rebound and then hit a jumper with 5:20 left to make it 53-51. She had scored MSU’s previous four points before the basket, too. MSU led 58-53 with 1:58 left when Roshunda Johnson hit a 3-pointer.
Mississippi State (37-2) had never before been in this good of a position to claim a national championship. This was the Bulldogs’ best-ever team. What’s more, the Bulldogs held a 15point lead early on in the third quarter, but that disappeared before the fourth quarter started.
Notre Dame entered this game averaging 85.8 points per game and shooting 50% from the field, but MSU held it to only three points in second quarter. MSU led 30-17 at halftime, and by then it had already forced 12 turnovers because of relentless half-court pressure.
Ogunbowale finished with 18 points, and Notre Dame’s Jessica Shepard had
19 points.
Victoria Vivians led all scorers with
21 points for Mississippi State in her last college game, and McCowan finished with 18 points and 17 rebounds.