South Carolina is the favorite; Why Staley is ‘not falling for it’
STORRS — When a question posed to her Friday afternoon was prefaced with recognition for the fact that her team is favored Sunday’s game against UConn at the XL Center after years of being an underdog in the series, South Carolina women’s basketball coach Dawn Staley quickly interjected.
“We are? Are we?” she said. “I think we’re the favorite for you all.”
Surrounded by media members in Columbia, S.C., Staley continued, “Some people may think otherwise. I’m not falling for it. The narrative really isn’t South Carolina is going to win the game. South Carolina is going to win the game because they have a depleted roster — that’s the narrative.”
The Gamecocks defeated UConn in last season’s national championship, earning their second title in six years. They returned most of their key players, are undefeated at 22-0 and ranked No. 1 unanimously atop each national poll.
They have, arguably, the nation’s most dominant player in Aliyah Boston, once a high-priority UConn recruiting target, and perhaps the deepest and most physically gifted team in the sport. The program, in 15 years under Staley, has progressed to the point where it expects to, and is expected to, compete for a championship every single season.
Such a designation has long been assigned to UConn — and sometimes only UConn over the past few decades — but South Carolina comes to frigid downtown Hartford this weekend as, yes, the team that is supposed to win.
How much that has to do with the fact that the Gamecocks are darn good and the injury
plagued Huskies have been darn unlucky can be part of the conversation, sure. But no matter to what degree the absence of Paige Bueckers and Azzi Fudd and others is relevant, the bottom line is that UConn’s guest, not UConn itself, is the one setting the pace lately in this particular matchup and in pursuit of the biggest April prizes.
UConn won the first eight games of the series but has lost three of the past four, one on the road in February 2020, early last season in the Bahamas and again to close out the season in Minneapolis, where confetti filled the court as the Huskies walked off in tears.
South Carolina has never won at UConn, though, dropping four at Gampel Pavilion and one at the XL. So Sunday’s game has the potential to make for another little shift in the college basketball landscape. The winner is guaranteed nothing, the loser will leave with all goals still attainable, but another chapter of the sport’s most visible series will have come and gone as nothing to pooh-pooh.
“Obviously winning at home is great, winning on a neutral court is great,” UConn coach Geno Auriemma said Friday before his team’s practice at the Werth Champions center. “But when you win on the road against a really good team that has the tradition that we have, it means a lot. And you can tell the way teams celebrate on our home court when they do win, that it’s not just a regular season win.
“There were a lot of guys that played at South Carolina that never had a chance to beat us home, neutral, away, NCAA Tournament, regular season. So for this group to have come to that point, that’s kind of how things evolve if your program gets really good and you keep adding to it and adding to it and players start to expect it.”
UConn has been there for a long time.
South Carolina has been coming, steadily.
Back in March 2018, when UConn was still in the breezy business of
beating the Gamecocks the way it beat most teams, Staley stepped on stage for an NCAA Tournament press conference, seemingly exasperated after a 29-point loss to the Huskies in the Elite Eight.
“We got beat by a really good UConn team,” she said. “Obviously we didn’t have enough to compete in the way that we would have liked to, but now all is well in women’s basketball.”
UConn was back in the Final Four. The Huskies had defeated South Carolina six weeks earlier in Columbia, 83-58, after taking a 53-24 halftime lead. The gap between these programs was still a mile wide.
The Huskies won the next season’s meeting in Hartford, in February 2019, but the South Carolina recruiting class that changed so much, headlined by Boston and guard Zia Cooke, arrived months later. Everything has been different since. Breanna Stewart and those around her formed an insurmountable UConn hurdle to the Gamecocks, who, depending on how Sunday and a potential postseason rematch go, could be remembered as something similar to certain waves of UConn players.
“Maybe there was a time when A’ja Wilson’s crew, when they didn’t think they could beat Stewie and those guys,” Auriemma said. “Now they’ve got a group of guys that, they come up here
and think they should win up here. So that’s where your program gets to when you get to a certain level. A win on the road against a quality team with great tradition on national television, it’s a big deal. It’s different than any other game you play. I mean, they played at Stanford, right?”
Yes, an overtime victory on Nov. 20.
“I mean, no disrespect or anything, but this is a little different, right?” Auriemma said.
A sold-out crowd of 15,000-plus is expected Sunday.
“For us, we’re going to continue to do what we’ve done all season long, display the habits we’ve displayed all season long and we hope that we’ll end up doing something we haven’t done up there,” Staley said. “And that’s win.”
Staley wore an Eagles hoodie as she spoke. Auriemma wore an Eagles shirt during a postgame press conference last week, following a victory over Villanova. Maybe that’s about all they can bond over these days, their shared love of a football team and not their shared basketball history, which is so rich.
“Yeah, I don’t think Geno and I are friends,” Staley said. “I think we are respectable people. When he was out [earlier this season], I texted him to make sure he was all right. But … we don’t talk. We don’t talk strategy. We
don’t talk outside of checking on people.”
Someone in the media pack minutes later asked, “Isn’t Geno from Philly?” and someone off camera said, “Norristown.” That’s the Philly suburb where Auriemma was raised.
Staley followed that up, saying, “He doesn’t have a 215 area code . ... Philly is 215.”
Auriemma, 68, has basically known Staley, 52, since she was a teenager. She was a junior on the Virginia team that defeated UConn’s first Final Four team in a national semifinal in 1991. One of the greatest point guards in history, Staley was a three-time Olympian and a member of the 2000 team, for which Auriemma was an assistant coach under Nell Fortner. Staley was then an assistant to Auriemma on the 2016 Olympic team before becoming the national team head coach, leading Team USA to a seventh consecutive Gold at the 2020 Olympics.
As Auriemma’s UConn project continued with great momentum, Staley spent eight seasons as coach at Temple before taking over at South Carolina in 2008.
Auriemma was asked Friday about Staley’s evolution, going from a great leader of teams as a player to a great leader of program as a coach.
“When players become coaches I think they fall into two categories and sometimes both at the
same time,” he said. “They’re already smarter than every coach they’ve ever played for, so when I get to be a head coach, this is how I’m going to do it and I’ll show everybody that I’m smarter than the average coach. And at the same time, there’s a little bit of leeriness, like, can I really do this? So you start to find yourself. It’s interesting how you evolve, though, into now she’s a little bit older, been around enough national championship games, coached at the highest level at the Olympics and had to deal with that and the pressure that comes from that. I think it gives you a different perspective.”
Staley’s first NCAA championship game in 2017 with a victory over Mississippi State, which had ended UConn’s 111game winning streak at the overtime buzzer in a semifinal. Her second title came five years after the first — just like Auriemma’s, whose UConn teams won championships in 1995 and 2000.
“When you’re young, you think anything’s possible,” Auriemma said. “You can do anything. You can beat anybody. Anytime. Anywhere. I think Dawn has taken the progression of a young player who becomes a young coach who grows into it, then just keeps getting better and better and better and better. With that comes a little bit of an appreciation for just how difficult this job really is, because in the beginning you don’t think it’s that hard. Until you win a national championship and can’t get back there for a couple years and then you start to go, damn, this is hard. She’s got a great staff and she’s not a young kid anymore. She’s not a young coach anymore. She’s a mature, older statesman in our game. We don’t have a lot of them.”
The sport doesn’t have many games like Sunday.
Asked if it will draw more fans to women’s basketball, Staley said, “I think it will attract more haters who will talk about how much people don’t watch basketball and don’t attend games. But it’s a sold out arena. And it’s 20 degrees there. So somebody’s coming out in the cold, the rain, the sleet, the snow, the blizzards, to watch the games.”
UConn plays at Marquette Wednesday. South Carolina plays at Auburn Thursday. Both coaches and both teams, come Monday and no matter Sunday’s result, will be thinking mostly about what’s next and hardly about what has taken place.
But UConn-South Carolina, even in the regular season, does mean something … no matter who is favored.
“If we weren’t good enough to win, I would have made a phone call and said, ‘We’re not quite ready,’ we maybe should spread some COVID cheer around the locker room or something,” Auriemma said. “It’s complicated, because if you take on that role of the underdog, you’re almost saying we don’t really have a chance to win so let’s just go out and give it our best and whatever happens happens, which, you know, that doesn’t fly over here, no matter what.
“If everything goes according to our plan — I’m sure they’ve got the same plans — something like this is going to happen again in March. You hope. At least I hope we’re in that situation. I know they’re going to be in that situation. But I hope we get enough people back that we’re in that situation.”