#1 South Carolina will try to beat #4 Connecticut for the first time ever in a Big Monday showdown in Columbia.
1. What does it mean? (or: A Brief History of the Series)
South Carolina and Connecticut played a home and home in 2007 and 2008, the latter game being played during Dawn Staley’s first season with the Gamecocks. Those games weren’t competitive (I remember after the 2008 game one UConn player completely forgetting she had played South Carolina the season before, a 97-39 win) and were basically played during another era.
The current series began in 2015. That first game got game-of-the-year buildup and the full force of the ESPN hype machine, as the upstart Gamecocks had taken over the number one ranking after the Huskies had their 47-game winning streak snapped early in the year by Stanford. The Gamecocks took a 22-0 record up to Storrs, but the Huskies won comfortably, 87-62.
Since then the series has fizzled a bit. UConn has won every game (8-0 against South Carolina, 7-0 in the Staley Era including one meeting in the Elite Eight), with the closest game a 66-55 win in 2017 (South Carolina got the last laugh that season, winning the national championship). By last season, the annual game had lost all sizzle. It had to do with South Carolina’s inability to win, but also the two teams’ relative approach. Although both Staley and Geno Auriemma tried to deny it, conference affiliations had ruined any chance of competitiveness. Playing in the weak AAC, UConn would, players admitted, prepare for South Carolina for weeks because there are few challenging conference games. On the other side, in the hyper-competitive SEC, UConn wasn’t even the most important game of the week for South Carolina.
This year, everything has lined up and the sizzle is back.
“You want to measure yourself,” Staley said. “They were the best team in the country and the decade. Their style of play is a little different from what you usually see. They execute on both sides of the ball at a really high level and you want to continue to measure yourself. If you can compete with them you can compete to win a national championship.”
Connecticut desperately needs this win. The AAC is weaker than ever this season: three teams are below 200 in the RPI, and Connecticut is the only team even in the top 50. In the past there has been a team like South Florida to boost the conference, and Connecticut could count on the getting the benefit of the doubt based on the eye test. But this season Connecticut’s resume is built entirely on its non-conference schedule there is no benefit of the doubt. With no dominant teams, but lots of very good teams, resume matters, and every conference game Connecticut plays actually lowers its RPI. Consider this: South Carolina is the fifth and final ranked team Connecticut will play before the NCAA tournament. South Carolina has already beaten eight ranked teams, and will play several more. Connecticut has split the first four, with wins over DePaul and Tennessee and lopsided home losses to Oregon and Baylor. Connecticut was a 2 seed in the top 16 reveal, but that was before the loss to Oregon. A loss to South Carolina could drop Connecticut to a three, although Louisville’s loss to Syracuse on Sunday did the Huskies a favor.
South Carolina doesn’t need the win as badly as Connecticut, but arguably for the first time since 2015, the Gamecocks have something at stake. South Carolina earned the number one overall seed in the top 16 reveal wants to hold onto that. A loss to Connecticut puts that in jeopardy, although it would take more to knock South Carolina out of the number one seed in Greenville. A win doesn’t clinch the top overall seed, but one of Oregon’s and Baylor’s key claims to the top spot is their wins over Connecticut, and they would no longer have that advantage.
“We didn’t talk about it with our team, but it’s something,” Staley said. “We can strengthen our hold on being the number one team, number one overall, and being in Greenville. You win a game, it takes care of itself. You lose a game and everybody else has their opinion on what is what. Hopefully we can squash that.”
“We don’t try to look too much at the seedings,” Tyasha Harris said. “We try to take it as a regular game, how we take all the other games.”
In a less tangible way, South Carolina can make a statement. With each passing month, the Gamecocks have raised the ceiling for this season. They have answered every challenge sent their way, usually in resounding fashion. Once and for all South Carolina put itself in the national championship conversation (since for some reason all the top 25 wins and the best resume in the country haven’t convinced some people). And maybe finally Staley and South Carolina can get the UConn monkey off their backs.
“Absolutely. Who likes to keep losing? Hopefully the tide has turned and we’re able to bring one home,” Staley said. “It’s a game. It’s one game. It doesn’t deter us from our goals, but it is a big game that we would surely like to win. Does it have some postseason ramifications? It does. But I hope they’ve watched the games that we’ve played and won because no one has that type of resume in the country. Win, lose, or draw, you can’t take away what we’ve done, the resume we’ve built.”
2. The freshmen
Probably the biggest question going into the game, and the factor that may decide who wins and loses, is how South Carolina’s freshmen play. Ole Miss coach Yolett McPhee-McCuin talked about the intimidation factor that comes with playing UConn, saying it felt like they started the game up 20. Everyone on South Carolina’s team knows about that, from freshmen to seniors. Aliyah Boston said her final decision between South Carolina and Connecticut was “very close.” She said she is treating it like just another game, which is what Staley wants to hear from her most important player.
“I’ve been the same,” Staley said. “When you heighten things up even more, your players take heed to that. I just want it to be as normal as the 23 games that we’ve played. She knows what she means to our team, Aliyah. She knows that when she’s on the floor, when she’s able to play her normal minutes, we’re a good basketball team. When she’s not, we’re not nearly as good.
McPhee-McCuin made her comment while describing a similar intimidation factor South Carolina now has, and that comes from the freshmen. They are calm, talented, and above all confident. They have displayed an extra gear that, along with seniors Harris and Mikiah Herbert Harrigan (and her alter ego “Mad KiKi”) they shift into against the toughest opponents, without ever getting too fired up. Staley has seen that in the buildup to this game
“It’s been pretty steady,” she said. “It’s amped up a little more. I’m getting text messages about what we need to do, and that’s rare when your players are texting you, ‘we can do this, we can do that.’ They’re engaged on all levels.”
It’s not just the swagger the freshmen have brought to the team. Staley was asked what the biggest difference is between this team and the previous teams that all came up short against Connecticut. She didn’t pick a player, or the defense and rebounding that has stymied the best opponents all season. She went with the balanced threat the freshmen have given the offense.
“We can score,” she said. “We're not going into the game thinking, ‘where are we going to generate 70-75 points’ and ‘keep them under 55-60, keep the game in the 60s.’ If it comes down to that, I think that’s good it favors us in that our defense is doing its job. It’s our offense that’s not picking up the slack. We’re able to score at five positions. We always have somebody on the floor that can score. We have to do our job in putting them there.”
3. Sell out
Since this iteration of the series began, every game in Columbia has been a sellout. As of Sunday night, there were less than 1,000 tickets remaining for this game, and you can bet that South Carolina will make sure those tickets end up in somebody’s hands. It will be the fifth sellout of Colonial Life Arena in program history, with one in each of the last five seasons. Connecticut will have been the opponent for three of those, with Kentucky (2017) and Mississippi State (2019) the others.
It will be a new experience for South Carolina’s freshmen. They played in front of more than 13,000 fans for the Mississippi State and Tennessee games. The crowd of 13,735 for the Tennessee game was the largest in the country this season, and that was just 75 percent of the crowd expected Monday. But those crowds were loud, and Harris thinks it was enough to prepare the freshmen for the sellout.
“I think they handled that with the Tennessee and Mississippi State games, just staying calm and composed,” Harris said. “Do what they do, don’t try to do anything extra.”
Staley is looking at the big picture, and eyeing the Kool-Aid. If nothing else, she said, this game helps prepare the gamecocks if they make the Final Four.
“For us it’s more electric because we are on somebody’s home court,” Staley said. “We’re able to get 18,000 in here and it is a Final Four feel because the Final Four has a capacity crowd. I’m just eager to be a part of the game, growing the game, getting our kids exposure at this level. A lot of times you can’t simulate - and I’m not saying we’re going to the Final Four, but we’ve been to the Final Four - you can’t simulate that unless you have the capacity arena like we do. I think all around it’s going to be great for all of us, UConn, us, women’s basketball, and our fans.”
This year’s Final Four will be played at the Smoothie King Center in New Orleans, which can hold up to 18,500 for basketball games.
4. Gamecock Olympians
The FIBA Olympic qualifying tournaments were held over the last week, and there were several Gamecocks involved. The four tournaments were held in three locations (one tournament was planned for China but moved to Serbia due to the coronavirus outbreak). Three former Gamecocks played in the tournament in Serbia, and one current Gamecock was in Belgium.
On Sunday, there were three Gamecocks in uniform when Team USA came back to beat Nigeria and finish 3-0. A’ja Wilson and Tiffany Mitchell played for USA, while Sarah Imovbioh was on the Nigerian team.
Imovbioh played in all three games and averaged 2.0 points and 2.0 rebounds in 7.1 minutes in helping Nigeria qualify for the Olympics. Mitchell also saw limited action, playing in all three games but only averaging 8.7 minutes and 3.7 points and 1.3 rebounds. Wilson, on the other hand, was a key contributor, averaging 12.7 points and a team-high 7.3 rebounds and was named to the all-tournament team.
Laeticia Amihere saw limited action with Team Canada, which went 3-0 and won its tournament. Amihere played 11 total minutes in two games, averaging 4.0 points and 2.5 rebounds. Amihere will be back in Columbia for Monday night’s game, and will be on the bench, but she will not play.
“She’ll probably want to play, but we won’t put her in that position,” Staley said.
5. Scouting the Huskies
The Huskies have, by their lofty standards, struggled this season. The 20-2 record is good, but the optics are not. DePaul is having a good season, but beating them still doesn’t move the needle. Neither does beating a rebuilding Tennessee team, and those are the two marquee wins for Connecticut. More trouble were the losses to Baylor and Oregon. It wasn’t just losing, it was how Connecticut lost - fading in the second half and losing by a large margin, at home (one in Hartford and one in Storrs), and looking - shockingly, if you’ve followed women’s college basketball in the last, oh, 25 years - like the less athletic and talented team. Connecticut doesn’t rebound especially well or get to the free throw line, signs of physically imposing teams. Baylor is big and long, but Oregon is a smaller team, which is what made it so surprising to see Connecticut struggle against Oregon’s defense. What Oregon and Baylor were able to do, and Tennessee was not, was to score enough to put pressure on Connecticut’s offense. Now Connecticut faces South Carolina, possibly the biggest, longest, most athletic and explosive team of the group.
“You’ve got to be able to score,” Staley said. “Baylor’s length bothered them, and athleticism and just speeding them up and forcing Megan Walker (off). They cut her production in half. When you can do that when you can take one of their bigs out of it, it puts so much pressure on everyone else to score. I don’t know if we’re capable of doing that, but we’ve got to do it on some level. We’ve certainly got to get up and down the floor and score the basketball.”
The Huskies still have plenty of talent. Crystal Dangerfield, who caught fire and shot the Gamecocks out of the 2018 tournament, is averaging 15.5 points and shooting 43 percent from three. Christyn Williams, the top recruit a couple years ago, is also averaging 15.5 points. But the key player for the Huskies is Walker. Walker leads the Huskies at 19.5 points and 9.0 rebounds, while shooting 43 percent from three. South Carolina will try to turn the game into a fast but physical match to force Connecticut out of its preferred rhythm, something it has been mostly successful with this season.
“They are really precise. They do everything to a T,” Harris said. “They do everything, what they need to do, perfectly. We need to speed them up and rough it up a little bit.”
But Walker also struggled in the key games against Baylor, Tennessee and Oregon. She shot a combined 11-51 overall and 7-22 from three and averaged just seven rebounds. Walker’s offensive struggles carried over to the rest of the team. In those three games, Connecticut averaged just 58 points, 20 points below its season average. Walker missed some early shots in those games, and seemed to let it affect her the rest of the game. South Carolina, especially Brea Beal, has a good track record of limiting high-scoring wings this season, and Walker is next up.
“For us we’ve got to speed her up and not give her comfortable shots in the flow of their offense. When her feet are set, she’s by herself, she’s very, very accurate,” Staley said. “We’ve got to disrupt and create some disruption in their offense.”
The Ws
Who: #1 South Carolina (22-1, 10-0) vs #4 Connecticut (20-2, 10-0)
When: Monday, February 10, 7:00 pm
Where: Colonial Life Arena
Watch: ESPN2
