Connecticut, South Carolina remind us: there’s room for both — Sound from the College All Star Game

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(Just a note: I’ll be off the grid next week, so there will be no Basketball Wednesday, as I finally enjoy some much-needed rest.)

The framing of the current moment — is South Carolina or Connecticut the dominant program? — mirrors the zero-sum level of sports, I suppose, since only one team can win at any one time. But it’s been very strange to me how dedicated people are to declaring definitively that only one program is reigning supreme at any given moment. Similarly odd are declarations like those calling for the end of the UConn dynasty, or similar calls about South Carolina after Sunday’s loss.

Oh, and UConn is still not bad for women’s basketball. I thought we’d killed that one permanently, but apparently not.

In fact, what’s happening right now are a pair of programs are operating at a level we’ve never really seen in the women’s college game. That is true in both absolute terms based on the success they are each enjoying, but also must take into account that the women’s game has never been more competitive.

Let’s start with what South Carolina just did: reached their fifth straight Final Four. You know how many other programs have done that? Two. UConn and Stanford. That’s it.

Stanford did it from 2008-2012, while South Carolina accomplished the feat in 2021-2025, and it is beyond dispute that there is far more talent, many more programs with proper investment, than there were when Tara VanDerveer accomplished the feat. The Gamecocks also won a pair of national titles along the way, while Stanford did not capture any of their three titles during that run.

This is not to suggest Tara and the Cardinal weren’t exceptional. Rather, how are we not making a bigger deal out of the fact that Dawn Staley and the Gamecocks just did something clearly more impressive than even that run by the Fightin’ Ogwumikes?

Particularly striking to me is that this year’s Gamecocks simply didn’t have a go-to offensive player. It turned out to be the difference on Sunday afternoon, since the Huskies had three of them. I asked Staley about this state of affairs the day before the title game.

“To be where we are, to be in the national championship game with the players that we have — and no, we don’t have a real go-to player, like a real person you get the ball in their hands and they’re going to playmake for you,” Staley said. “I think, to me, it’s just old-school basketball where you’re just playing to your strengths, and our strength is our depth, our ability to play together, to play linked up. And I think a staple for us has been our ability to defend because the offense will sometimes go off on a journey on its own. And our mainstay has been our ability to defend and come up with schemes that will help us through those stretches where we’ve got a lull from an offensive standpoint.”

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Notably, Staley promised to go get reinforcements in the transfer portal, and with apologies to Olivia Miles, she just added the best player available in the portal in Ta’Niya Latson, precisely the go-to scorer who could have made a difference on Sunday. The Gamecocks will be as likely as anyone to reach Phoenix in 2026, and add a third title within that run (four total including 2017!) to the mix.

As likely as anyone, that is, alongside the Huskies, who ended what some fans called a drought, because Geno and UConn hadn’t won a title since 2016. As I wrote in my game story at The Next, the fallow period lasted 3,288 days, with the Huskies sputtering to just a 294-31 record over that time, with a mere seven Final Fours in eight chances.

We should all fail the way Geno Auriemma and the 2017-2024 Huskies did.

The win served as validation for what Auriemma has been saying the whole time: that the Era of Connecticut wasn’t over. It simply wasn’t as evident during a period of time they suffered through numerous injuries, particularly to Paige Bueckers and Azzi Fudd, and lacked the depth to compensate for it. Again, though: they made every single Final Four played from 2008-2022, then again in 2024, and finally, won a title in 2025. 24 Final Fours — that’s 60 percent of his seasons! 12 national titles. He did it in the 1990s women’s basketball era, he did it in the 2000s, he did it in the 2010s, and he’s doing it in a fundamentally different landscape, deeper talent pool and far more competitors for those players, here in 2025.

As Auriemma put it to me, standing in the hallway just in front of the Connecticut locker room: “All those years, I just went home and went, ‘they didn’t really beat Connecticut.’ When we show up with our whole team and you beat us then you beat Connecticut. The rest of the time? You beat a patchwork of Connecticut players. So, I was okay.”

He spoke in similar terms Sunday evening about how he can replace Bueckers — “You don’t, you hope that you bring in enough good players that do the same things that you need done that Paige did, but you’re not replacing Paige” — to how he spoke about Branna Stewart, and Maya Moore, and Diana Taurasi. No one is more experienced at doing just that than Auriemma, Chris Dailey and his staff. Plus, he’ll have the returning Azzi Fudd and Sarah Strong, who Staley said has a chance to be the best Connecticut player ever, something I wouldn’t dispute, while Auriemma compared her to Charles Barkley because there’s never been a women’s player with precisely her skills in his view. (I recently compared her to a cross between Aliyah Boston’s ability to dictate pace and Breanna Stewart’s skillset. That player really is, essentially, Barkley.)

So Connecticut’s probably going to be in Phoenix, too. But it won’t be easy! Texas brings back Madison Booker and Rori Harmon. UCLA returns Lauren Betts and adds Sienna Betts! I won’t even venture a guess where they end up, or anyone else really, since the transfer portal is active and polling already.

All of it is great for the sport. None of it is zero-sum. And my challenge to anyone who says otherwise is to explain to me why we should choose here, when no one had to choose during the World Series battles between the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Yankees, no one had to choose to only cover Bill Russell or Wilt Chamberlain, no one considered the Dallas Cowboys or San Francisco 49ers hidden franchises living in the shadows in the 1980s and 1990s. It was never Lakers OR Celtics — the video game was literally called “Lakers vs. Celtics”.

It’s Dawn Staley and it’s Geno Auriemma. Let’s all keep our full attention on both of them. It’s an embarrassment of riches for the sport. And only an outdated, narrow view of how we cover women’s sports would force us to do anything less.

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This week in women’s basketball

I have to salute what my incredible team at The Next did throughout the NCAA Tournament. Over 80 reported stories. Incredible.

Josh Verlin on Rider’s new head coach.

Maitreyi on Azzi.

Detroit Shock beat reporter Michael Rosenberg on Dawn Staley’s program.

Alexa on Paige.

Isabel Gonzalez followed Paige for the day when she won the title.

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Five at The IX: Sound from the College All Star Game

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Mondays: Soccer

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