Rastall Ramblings: UConn climbs back to mountaintop with full-circle national title
It feels strange to call a nine-year stretch without a national championship a “drought.” Yet given the dominance of the UConn women’s basketball program under Geno Auriemma, the Huskies going nearly a decade without a national title would have felt almost unfathomable at one time.
Rewind back to the mid-2010s, when UConn still had a total stranglehold on college basketball as the dominant force on the women’s side. The Huskies racked up 11 national championships between 1995 and 2016, including winning 10 of 17 since the turn of the century and an unprecedented four in a row from 2013 to 2016.
UConn went into the 2017 Final Four carrying a 111-game winning streak as they looked for a fifth straight title. That winning streak was snapped in memorable fashion by Mississippi State, who beat them 66-64 in overtime on a Morgan William jumper at the buzzer. Even as someone who wasn’t following women’s college basketball at the time, I distinctly remember watching that ending at Paul’s Club in Madison.
As it turned out, that would be the start of UConn’s longest stretch between national titles under Auriemma after previously never going more than four years without winning it all since their first one in 1995.
That certainly didn’t mean the Huskies suddenly faded to obscurity. They were 36-0 going into the 2018 Final Four before losing 91-89 in OT to Notre Dame on Arike Ogunbowale’s jumper with a second left. They again lost in the Final Four in both 2019 and 2021, lost in the national championship game for the first time in 2022 and were bounced by Caitlin Clark and the Iowa Hawkeyes in a narrow 71-69 loss in the 2024 Final Four.
The Huskies also had rotten injury luck in the last few years, but it all finally came together this season.
Paige Bueckers joined UConn in 2020 as one of the most hyped recruits in the history of college basketball. Though her production lived up to the billing, a couple of injuries and the emergence of Clark caused her to take a little bit of a backseat in the national discourse until this winter. Despite all her success, Bueckers’s status as an all-time UConn great would’ve felt a little hollow without a national championship.
Bueckers, freshman sensation Sarah Strong and Azzi Fudd (the eventual 2025 NCAA Tournament Most Outstanding Player) formed a Big Three that helped the Huskies peak at the perfect time.
After dipping from the preseason No. 2 in the AP rankings to No. 7 in mid-February, UConn put the country back on notice by walloping No. 4 South Carolina 87-58 on the road. That was near the start of what would be a 16-game winning streak by the Huskies to finish the season.
In the NCAA Tournament, the second-seeded Huskies beat three straight No. 1 seeds to capture the national championship: a 78-64 win over a USC team sans JuJu Watkins in the Elite Eight, an 85-51 thumping of UCLA in the national semifinals, and an 82-59 blowout against South Carolina in the championship game.
It was fitting that UConn beat the Gamecocks to end their run back to the mountaintop. In the wake of the Huskies falling off their perch in the sport, it was South Carolina who emerged as the premier program in the sport in the last decade under Dawn Staley.
After Mississippi State knocked UConn off at the buzzer in 2017, it was the Gamecocks who beat the Bulldogs in the following game to win their first of three national titles. And it was South Carolina who handed what is to date the Huskies’ one and only loss in a national championship game in 2022.
In a way, it feels a little like a full circle moment to have UConn reach the summit once again by vanquishing the Gamecocks. It may also only be the start of another run of dominance.
Bueckers is gone to the WNBA after the storybook ending to her college career, but the Huskies are still loaded with talent. It would come as no surprise if UConn put together one last dynastic run before Auriemma decides to close the book on one of the greatest coaching careers of all-time in any sport.
