Morgan William’s body, all 5-foot-5 of her, shook with sobs as her Mississippi State coach, Vic Schaefer put his arm around her on the court in Oklahoma City Sunday night.
“This one is like another daughter to me,” Schaefer said of William, his point guard and the roommate of his actual daughter and fellow Bulldog, Blair. William’s own father died three years ago Saturday. She dedicated the game to him, then performed like few ever have in the history of the NCAA Tournament.
William managed to score 41 points, connecting on 6-of-8 3-pointers, to catapult Mississippi State past top seed Baylor and their impossibly tall, efficient center, Kalani Brown, 94-85 in overtime.
Anti-incumbency is in right now for women’s basketball. So it came to pass that the Bulldogs are off to their first Final Four in Dallas this week, a feat accomplished by three teams last year—Oregon State, Washington and Syracuse.
So, too, is Stanford (though not a newcomer) which erased a 16-point deficit against Notre Dame in a battle of blue bloods, emerging victorious in a 76-75 game that came down to a defensive stop. The game between Stanford coach Tara VanDerveer (1,012 career wins) and Notre Dame coach Muffet McGraw (853 wins) was played crisply, with key plays made by both sides in what itself felt like a Final Four matchup, rather than the Lexington regional.
The other two slots in the Final Four to be played this week in Dallas will be decided Monday night. South Carolina is eager to cement itself as a permanent member of the women’s basketball powers with a second Final Four berth in three years. They face Florida State, who are paced by the ultra-athletic 5-foot-11 big Shakayla Thomas and hyper-efficient point guard Leticia Romero, in the Stockton, California regional.
And naturally, it all comes back to Connecticut, who will take on Oregon in Bridgeport. The Huskies have now won 110 straight. It should be noted that whoever eventually beats Connecticut, assuming that happens before the universe expands and breaks apart (Vegas has those two outcomes even money) will manage the biggest upset in recent sports memory.
But if the Oregon Ducks do it, well, this is a No. 10 seed — they’d simultaneously be creating sports history by who they beat, and becoming the lowest seed ever to reach the Final Four. The seeding is less revelatory of their talent than usual — the team is paced by a trio of freshmen, efficient big Ruthy Hebard, flashy point guard Sabrina Ionescu and classic power forward Mallory McGwire, along with the nation’s leading 3-point shooter in junior Lexi Bando — who are now going to enter next season as a consensus top-ten team in the country, no matter how they fare against Connecticut.
Still, Connecticut proved again in its Sweet 16 game against UCLA that it simply requires so much to go wrong, or right for the opposition, for the Huskies as constituted to lose. With four starters who will be WNBA first round picks whenever they are finished playing for the Huskies — Kia Nurse, Gabby Williams, Naphessa Collier and Katie Lou Samuelson — each among the most valuable players in the country, getting there in dramatically different ways—Connecticut was tough enough to beat already.
But the Bruins managed to limit Nurse’s offense, kept Samuelson to just a pair of 3-pointers, committed just six turnovers themselves, received near-perfect performances from pogo-stick big Monique Billings and lightning-quick point guard Jordin Canada, and still lost, 86-71, in part because Saniya Chong, a senior guard who has seldom scored much in NCAA Tournament play, finished with 16 points, 5 rebounds and 3 assists.
Accordingly, Oregon-Connecticut serves as a useful guidepost for where the sport is right now. A broadening talent pool and increase in the number of programs that realized hey, if we invest a little in women’s basketball, it can turn into a prestige and cash cow pretty quickly means that teams like Oregon are no longer fenced off from things like an Elite Eight game.
“Like anything else, you know, when you’ve got the right person at the top and you get the support of the university,” Connecticut coach Geno Auriemma said of his counterpart at Oregon, Kelly Graves, on Sunday. Graves came from Gonzaga, where he’d built a perennial West Coast Conference champion and double-digit Elite Eight run of their own, and turned the Ducks into a power in just three years. “This is what happens, and it should happen more places.”
But expected threats to Connecticut like Baylor or Maryland, who fell to Oregon in the Sweet 16, reinforce how remarkable it is that the Huskies keep on responding to the expectation of winning by doing nothing else.
Next: Morgan William dedicates dominant Elite Eight win to late father (Video)
“I must say that every day: If you want to be like everybody else, why did you come here?”, Auriemma said by way of explaining his team’s track record. “So we’re trying to be different. We’re trying to do things that are hard to do, that are not the norm. So if you’re just going to go out and half-ass through something, then why did you come here?”