UConn’s chase for perfection ends in most imperfect way in Final Four loss to South Carolina
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In those seasons, UConn hasn’t just been perfect. The Huskies have cleared the bar with ease.
On Friday night in Phoenix, two games away from perfect season No. 7, they took the floor against South Carolina. It was UConn coach Geno Auriemma’s 25th Final Four appearance. This time, he was coaching a team riding a 54-game winning streak and sitting at 38-0 on the year.
They ended nowhere close to that.
Don’t say it fell apart for the Huskies, because that wouldn’t be giving South Carolina its due in the 62-48 win.
The Gamecocks came into the Final Four with a surgical game plan, and the players executed, not to a T but with enough of a margin that it didn’t matter. They weren’t perfect, but they were the better team. It didn’t matter that UConn had the nation’s best player in Sarah Strong, a generational shooter in Azzi Fudd and college basketball’s winningest coach in Auriemma.
South Carolina had the answers.
“We stuck to the scouting report,” South Carolina guard Ta’Niya Latson said. “We knew their tendencies, what they liked. I think we executed it really, really well.”
Even before Auriemma initiated a confrontation with Dawn Staley near the end of the game, the cracks had begun to show.
Fudd couldn’t hit much of anything, and she couldn’t stop the spiral as the misses piled up. The player with a jump shot Steph Curry has said is prettier than his, stopped shooting and started aiming. And then finished the game with only 8 points.
En route to a double-double, the ever-stoic Strong got frustrated enough that she ripped her own uniform (whether it was torn before she finished the job is secondary to the fact that she got to that point at all).
With less than a minute in the game, Kayleigh Heckel missed a wide-open layup and had to be subbed out because she began to tear up. As teammates literally held her chin up, the writing was on the wall. South Carolina had gotten the better of UConn that night, and perfection was no longer in reach. The Huskies would need to settle for 38-1.
“Our whole objective was to get them to shoot as inefficiently as possible,” Staley said.
Check mate: UConn’s 31 percent shooting percentage was its worst single-game performance in four seasons.
A week ago in Fort Worth, Texas, during the Sweet 16 and Elite Eight, Fudd and Strong — who shot 23 percent from the floor against South Carolina — both seemed tight. They had slow offensive starts in both games leading into the Final Four and weren’t their usual, smooth selves.
“We didn’t make any shots the whole weekend in Fort Worth, but our defense was really good and we hung in there,” Auriemma said. “We knew going in here today that if we shot the ball like we did in Fort Worth, you’re not gonna beat these teams generally.”
Auriemma’s previous perfect teams haven’t needed to “hang in there” en route to cutting nets after a national championship. Instead, they’d leave scorched earth in their wake and make other great teams their footnotes in the march to yet another national title.
That was not this team. UConn had flaws. Those flaws hadn’t yet been exposed but the right matchup, the right familiarity, the right something could take UConn down. After all, a team doesn’t have to be perfect to finish the season with a perfect record, but it has to be better than the Huskies.
Staley knows all too well how this goes. In 2023, with a senior-laden team riding a 42-game winning streak and sitting at 36-0 on the season, the Gamecocks lost to Iowa in the Final Four.
“I’m still haunted by it,” Staley said.
The Gamecocks came back and won it the next year, but that senior class was gone. The players who had helped sustain the South Carolina program after it had won its first national title in 2017, then won it again in 2022 didn’t get to repeat in 2023.
Fudd, who spent five seasons with UConn, won’t get a chance to repeat as a national champion. She has only one. A statement that sounds ludicrous to say … unless you played at UConn for five years. But after helping lead the Huskies to the national title last season and being named the Final Four’s Most Outstanding Player in the process, Fudd has played her final game in a UConn uniform.
It will sting, because it should. Not just because the Huskies lost, but because of how they lost. UConn wasn’t a perfect team, but it was 80 minutes away from perfection — closer than almost anyone ever gets. Unfortunately for the Huskies, that’s the closest they got.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
South Carolina Gamecocks, Connecticut Huskies, Women's College Basketball
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