TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Kamilla Cardoso was not walking through that door, but it felt like she was there with Joyce Edwards.
In the second of five straight games against top-20 opponents, South Carolina women’s basketball beat Alabama 76-58 in a game with all the feels of one from the past few seasons. No. 2 South Carolina (17-1, 5-0 SEC) still has a decided advantage against most of its opponents, but took advantage to the maximum against a particularly undersized No. 19 Alabama (16-3, 3-2 SEC) team also down its second-leading rebounder, Sarah Ashlee Barker.
South Carolina dominated Alabama 51-34 on the glass, using its size advantage to dictate terms offensviely. The three regular post players all took turns backing down smaller defenders and drawing contact, particularly Edwards and Chloe Kitts. Edwards scored a career-high 21 points and had 11 in the final frame, and Kitts had her fifth double-double of the season in the bag less than two minutes into the second half, winding up with 10 points and 13 rebounds as the Crimson Tide did not have a match-up for her.
"Any time we get any post scoring, it's only going to open the game up for our guards," Dawn Staley said. "Chloe's been doing a great job at just head down, and going. She's a veteran; she's one of our most experienced post players. I do think she feels the weight of losing Ashlyn [Watkins], and it's working out in our favor."
But the Gamecocks never really pulled away. The turnover bugaboo popped up again with 15, including five in a dreadful third quarter. South Carolina missed nine of its first 10 shots from beyond the arc, several of them good looks. And the team known for its quickstrike ability, the potency to go on a 10-0 run in a blink and completely bury a team, never found a run after the early moments. South Carolina did score 12 points in a row in the first half of the first quarter, but never scored more than six in a row until the finishing flurry against an exhausted Crimson Tide starting lineup which played nearly the entire game.
A fundamentally strong Alabama team valued the basketball with just six turnovers in the first three-and-a-half quarters, got balanced scoring from Essence Cody, Zaay Green and Aaliyah Nye all in double-figures, and kept South Carolina in touching distance all night.
Late in the third quarter, it made its run. Alabama trimmed the deficit as low as four points as the Coleman Coliseum crowd found its voice, pushing the gamecocks on their heels as they had more turnovers than made field goals over the final eight minutes of the third quarter.
"I thought we played at their pace," Staley said. "They stuck around to the end of the game and made it a two-possession game. What we weren't doing was executing. They made it hard for us to catch, we weren't getting open and they disrupted the flow of our offense, so we've got to get better."
But with the deficit at five, Edwards took over. She scored on the first possession of the fourth quarter, a sign of things to come. The true freshman went on a fourth quarter flurry, scoring 11 points in the final frame to boost her total to 21, a new career-high.
In a game missing a dagger, Edwards put the final nail in the coffin with an and-1 inside the final two minutes which gave the Gamecocks a then game-high 16-point lead and extinguished the last flames of a tough Alabama squad.
"Joyce is special," Staley said. "She's a relentless worker, she's a tireless worker, she wants to be great at everything that she does. To see her play as consistently and efficiently over the past couple of games, is saying that she's found her footing."
Two down, three to go in the stretch of five straight against ranked teams.
But South Carolina won’t be looking for too many more performances like those first three quarters.
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