San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Longhorns, Cardinal meet again
Over the course of 80 feet, Ohio State star Jacy Sheldon tried everything to shake the Texas freshman. Crossovers and double crossovers. Hesitations and head fakes. Insideout dribbles and slight forearm jabs.
None of it worked on Rori Harmon. She was Sheldon’s straitjacket, and not even Houdini could’ve pried her off.
About eight seconds after the cat-and-mouse began, Sheldon picked up her dribble in the right corner and, while lurching toward the hardwood, passed off to teammate Tanaya Beachem. Harmon denied the giveback, so Beachem had to spin and hoist the potential game-tying 3.
Except when Beachem whirled around she came face to face with another Texas freshman: 6-foot-1 Aaliyah Moore. A long right arm blocked the shot at the buzzer, preserving the second-seeded Longhorns’ 66-63 win over the sixth-seeded Buckeyes on Friday night in the Spokane Regional semifinals.
So much more went into the win over the preceding 39-plus minutes, but those final 10.7 seconds were the culmination of a dogged gamelong effort to, as they say, survive and advance to the Elite Eight of the NCAA women’s tournament. It wasn’t Texas’ prettiest victory of the season, nor its cleanest (17 turnovers), but it may have been the gutsiest.
Even with top-seeded Stanford (31-3) awaiting in Sunday’s Spokane Regional final, the Longhorns’ 14th straight win solidified their status as a bona fide national championship contender. And as Texas (29-6) already proved once this season, it might be better equipped than any team in the nation to halt the Cardinal’s march toward a repeat.
“These kids, they don’t care who’s in front of ’em, they don’t care what the number is, they don’t care about anything,” Texas coach Vic Schaefer said Friday night at Spokane Arena. “And we talk about it all the time, March doesn’t care either. March doesn’t care what you’re ranked, March doesn’t care how you finished in your conference. It doesn’t care. You’ve got to go play the game.”
About four and a half months ago, Texas went into Maple Pavilion
and crashed Stanford’s national championship celebration.
The Longhorns outscored the reigning champs by 10 in the fourth quarter of a 61-56 win. The Cardinal, still adjusting to life without All-American point guard Kiana Williams at the time, totally succumbed to Texas’ full-court pressure, shooting just 41.7 percent while committing five turnovers.
Of course, Nov. 14, 2021, was forever ago.
Texas is a more complete team than it was then. And Stanford, winner of 23 straight, is doing just fine without Williams thanks to arguably the deepest roster Tara VanDerveer has ever coached, a group that includes Pac-12 player of the year Haley Jones, Pac-12 defensive player of the year Cameron Brink and three-time all-conference guard Lexie Hull.
“I don’t think anyone on our team has forgotten about that,” VanDerveer said of the long-ago loss to Texas. “I know they’re better and I think we’re better. It’s going to be a great game on Sunday and our team will be ready and we will learn from this game and we will move on.”
Texas goes deep, too, as Friday’s win over the Big Ten regular-season champs at Spokane Arena proved.
Harmon got into early foul trouble and played just eight scoreless minutes in the first half. Moore, who’d been borderline unstoppable
in the first two rounds, missed 7 of 10 shots and a couple free throws. And the entire team struggled against the full-court pressure of Ohio State, which converted 17 turnovers into 18 points.
But in moments of crisis or underperformance, Schaefer can still lean on one of the best defensive groups in the nation. And he can call upon clearheaded seniors Lauren Ebo, Joanne Allen-Taylor and Audrey Warren to steady the ship. And he can look to junior transfer Aliyah Matharu or 6-foot-2 sophomore DeYona Gaston for a quick spark.
Those five all made pivotal plays to keep Texas’ season afloat.
“Literally, we are a team, y’all,” Schaefer said. “We’ve been that way all year. We have three kids that average anywhere from 12to-10 points, but we also have kids that can go off for 17 or 27.”
For the second time in as many years, Texas is one of eight teams left in the field.
And as special as Schaefer thought his first group of Longhorns was, his second looks good enough to claim the program’s second national title and first since 1986.
“They enjoy playing with each other,” Schaefer said. “They feed off each other. I think our team cares about each other. Sometimes that’s a unique deal. In athletics there can be jealousy and things like that, but not with this group. It’s a really special group.”
Maybe even special enough to get this program back into the Final Four for the first time since 2003.