Auriemma initiated a confrontation<\/a> with Dawn Staley near the end of the game, the cracks had begun to show.<\/p>\nFudd couldn\u2019t hit much of anything, and she couldn\u2019t stop the spiral as the misses piled up. The player with a jump shot that NBA star Steph Curry has said is prettier than his, stopped shooting and started aiming. And then finished the game with only 8 points.<\/p>\n
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).<\/p>\n
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 got the better of UConn that night, and perfection was no longer in reach. The Huskies would need to settle for 38-1.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur whole objective was to get them to shoot as inefficiently as possible,\u201d Staley said.<\/p>\n
Checkmate: UConn\u2019s 31 percent shooting percentage was its worst single-game performance in four seasons.<\/p>\n
It took five months for the Huskies to be nearly perfect, and less than 40 minutes for it all to unravel.<\/p>\n
A week ago in Fort Worth, Texas, during the Sweet 16 and Elite Eight, Fudd and Strong \u2014 who shot 23 percent from the floor against South Carolina \u2014 seemed tight. They had slow offensive starts in both games leading into the Final Four and weren\u2019t their usual, smooth selves.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe didn\u2019t make any shots the whole weekend in Fort Worth, but our defense was really good, and we hung in there,\u201d Auriemma said. \u201cWe knew going in here today that if we shot the ball like we did in Fort Worth, you\u2019re not gonna beat these teams generally.\u201d<\/p>\n
Auriemma\u2019s previous perfect teams haven\u2019t needed to \u201chang in there\u201d en route to cutting nets after a national championship. Instead, they\u2019d leave scorched earth in their wake and make other great teams their footnotes in the march to yet another national title.<\/p>\n
That was not this team. UConn had flaws. Those flaws hadn\u2019t yet been exposed, but the right matchup, the right familiarity, the right something could take UConn down. After all, a team doesn\u2019t have to be perfect to finish the season with a perfect record, but it has to be better than the Huskies.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m still haunted by it,\u201d Staley said.<\/p>\n
The Gamecocks came back and won it the next year, but that senior class was gone. The players who helped sustain the South Carolina program after it had won its first national title in 2017, then won it again in 2022, didn\u2019t get to repeat in 2023.<\/p>\n
Fudd, who spent five seasons with UConn, won\u2019t get a chance to repeat as a national champion. She has only one. A statement that sounds ludicrous to say \u2026 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\u2019s Most Outstanding Player in the process, Fudd has played her final game in a UConn uniform.<\/p>\n
It will sting, and it should. Not only because the Huskies lost, but also because of how they lost. UConn wasn\u2019t a perfect team, but it was 80 minutes away from perfection \u2014 closer than almost anyone ever gets. Unfortunately for the Huskies, that\u2019s the closest they got.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PHOENIX \u2014 No one knows more about perfection in women\u2019s basketball than UConn. Six times the Huskies have…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":540631,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[462],"tags":[44003,5,4,465,466,39357,17991],"class_list":{"0":"post-540630","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nhl-draft","8":"tag-connecticut-huskies","9":"tag-hockey","10":"tag-nhl","11":"tag-nhl-draft","12":"tag-nhl-entry-draft","13":"tag-south-carolina-gamecocks","14":"tag-womens-college-basketball"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nhl\/116347648578582934","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540630","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=540630"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540630\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/540631"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=540630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=540630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=540630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}