Baylor’s Chloe Jackson sticks around and plays the hero to win national championship

TAMPA — The defining moment of Sunday night’s NCAA women’s national title game did not come in the final seconds — not when Chloe Jackson’s shot went through the basket in the final seconds, giving Baylor a lead it would not relinquish, nor when Arike Ogunbowale’s first free throw danced cruelly on the rim before falling away.

It happened with 9:26 to go in the game when Jackson committed her fourth foul, and Baylor coach Kim Mulkey elected not to take her out of the game.

“Well, I trusted her,” an emotionally drained Kim Mulkey said at the postgame presser, sitting at the podium. “I trusted her. There’s no tomorrow, so why sit them on the bench? They foul out, they foul out, and then I’m ripped to shreds by y’all because I didn’t sub. I get it. But I had to trust my kids.”

The gamble proved a worthwhile one, with Jackson scoring 26 points, dishing out five assists and committing a single turnover in Baylor’s 82-81 win to capture the 2019 title. Jackson did not commit another foul and ultimately played all 40 minutes. Mulkey trusted Jackson, yes, but only after Jackson made the case.

“Well, I just looked at Coach Mulkey,” Jackson said, her championship hat turned backward on her head, glowingly recounting every second of a game she’ll remember, and be remembered for, as long as people care about basketball. “And she goes ‘Well, you have four’, and I said, ‘I know, I got you. I’m not going to foul out.’ My team needed me, so I had to play good defense, not pick up another one, and just stay composed.”

Still, the stakes of it raised further still when Lauren Cox, she of the never-ending wingspan and remarkable defensive versatility, crumpled to the floor with an injury so severe, she needed to be wheeled off, crying into the top of her jersey as she left her team in the hands of the seniors, Kalani Brown and Jackson.

“It was tough when she went down,” Jackson said of Cox. “Obviously that’s our leader, one of our leaders, obviously, [with] Kalani. We just had to come together. Our motto is together to Tampa. We had to stick together. We knew it was going to be tough without her, but we had to do it for her. That’s what was going through our heads.”

“I believed it. That’s why I chose Baylor.” — Chloe Jackson

They proved up to the task. The moment was four years in the making for Brown, an elite recruit who was supposed to lead Baylor to a title.

The journey was different for Chloe Jackson, a basketball nomad who played at N.C. State and LSU before joining Baylor this year as a graduate transfer.

She chose Baylor for many reasons — for the chance to win a championship, for the opportunity to prove to both WNBA talent evaluators and herself that she can play point guard after years as a more traditional shooting guard. And even if her heroics Sunday night wasn’t something many saw coming, Chloe Jackson certainly did.

“Absolutely,” Jackson said. “I believed it. That’s why I chose Baylor.”

The final game itself was a journey of epic proportions. The first quarter included something for Baylor that their semifinal win over Oregon didn’t — a made three, by Juicy Landrum. Jackson followed with a baseline jumper, and the Bears were up, 11-3.

But soon after, Brown suffered a cramp and had to come out of the game. That led Nalyssa Smith to play the part of Brown inside, and she proved ready as well, looking anything but freshman like as she challenged Notre Dame bigs Jessica Shepard and Brianna Turner, scoring a pair of hoops at the rim and actually increasing Baylor’s lead to 17-7 by the time Brown returned.

For Mulkey, it offered a window into a future when the Bears will be more reliant on Smith, and even once Brown returned, she deployed the three bigs together.

For Smith, who finished with 14 points on nine shots, it just represented the completion of the very things she, too, had seen in her mind’s eye when she chose Baylor.

“For sure. I knew, coming to Baylor with the team we had set up and then getting a grad transfer like Chloe, it was going to be a special year for us,” Smith said, beaming at her locker. The part they just didn’t see coming was Cox’s injury. She fell to the floor, and Mulkey knew right away that something was wrong — “I know she’s hurt because that kid would have gotten up”, Mulkey would say later in her postgame interview. As she walked purposefully across the floor, her audible “You’ve got to be f*****g kidding me” in an otherwise silent Amelie Arena reflected awful memories of losing her point guard, Kristy Wallace, in similar fashion last season.

“But from the time I left her on that floor to get to that huddle, I needed to regroup,” Mulkey said. “I needed to regroup. I needed to make them understand, We’re going to still win this basketball game. It will be a little bit tougher now, but we’ve got to battle, and we did.”

It wasn’t without the last bit of drama after Jackson’s 12-footer went down — a familiar play, one the Bears ran late against Oregon as well. Notre Dame gave the ball to Arike Ogunbowale, the twice-crowned buzzer-beating hero in last year’s Final Four, and she drove to the basket in a play Muffet McGraw, the Notre Dame coach, said they’d decided on for such a scenario “a week ago”.

“Really, I was just praying that she missed those free throws,” Smith said, laughing. Incredibly, the automatic Ogunbowale did, missed both really — the first one bounced around and then off the rim, and she intended to miss the second one, but it went in, depriving Notre Dame of a chance to try and tip in a game-tying rebound.

And then it was over, the confetti falling everywhere, and Chloe Jackson still on the floor, not disqualified, not benched, but in the highlight videos, we’ll see for many years to come.