UConn hasn’t won it all since 2016 and that seems like ages ago.
South Carolina has taken the torch from them since then but only has 2 natties. For as dominant as they’ve been year after year that’s kind of surprising.
Excellent point. My thoughts are as follows.
1. Teams are just better than they were in UCONN's prime. You look at some of the players Geno had and you had legit all time greats (Diana, Sue, Stewie, Maya, etc). I think Ms. Wilson is an all time great and Ms. Boston has potential but the talent is different.
2. South Carolina's roster building philosophy is different. Geno always had a generational talent and featured that talent in his offense. His motion offense allows more freedom for elite players to make plays and go get a bucket when need be. Dawn focuses on trying to recruit generational “impact bigs”
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and surround them with complementary pieces with an emphasis on defense, depth and rebounding.
3. For as dominant as South Carolina has been the blueprint to beat them is the same. Get their bigs in early foul trouble, pack the paint, make their perimeter players make threes. As great as Clark was against them in the F4 game, those two early fouls on Boston set the tone.
4. Dawn is stubborn in that she believes that her defensive strategy with the players she has will work and 9 times out of 10 it will, but her not putting Brea Beal on Clark until the 4th and not throwing in a zone or other Junk defense was criminal. Same thing happened when they lost to Stanford, they were trading 2s for 3s. Geno is more flexible on that front.
5. It took last year’s loss to force Dawn to prioritize getting shooters in the portal like Paopao. We will see if this helps.