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7 hours ago
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A classic narrative, dating back to the classic matchup of David v Goliath, is the underdog v the favorite.
The only problem is that the underdog is an underdog for the reason. Sure, everyone loves it when a David wins, but Goliath usually swats him away with predictable ease and then pounds him into the dirt. Which leads to a problem: who, other than devoted fans of the team in question, roots for the perennial champions? Isn’t that a bit like watching Hoosiers and rooting for the big kids to beat Gene Hackman’s scrappy underdogs? Or watching Rocky IV and rooting for Drago?
In women’s college basketball, 12 Division I teams have finished the regular season and conference tournaments undefeated since 2009. Six of them won the national championship. (In 2014, two undefeated teams – Connecticut and Notre Dame – faced off in the final.) In Division III, 10 of the last 11 tournament winners have been undefeated, and NYU are on a 91-game winning streak. The Violets passed UConn to take second place among the longest win streaks in NCAA women’s basketball history, second only to … UConn, who won 111 straight from 2014 to 2017. Division III this season had three unbeaten teams heading into the tournament, but Washington and Lee lost in the Elite Eight, leaving NYU and Scranton to battle in the Final Four to determine which unbeaten team will contest the final.
Men’s basketball has had far fewer dominant teams. No Division I team has entered the NCAA Tournament unbeaten since Gonzaga in the Covid-afflicted 2020-21 season. The last team to get through the Division I grind in a full season was Kentucky in 2014-15, and the Wildcats lost in the Final Four. No team has gone undefeated through the entire season, including tournaments, since Indiana pulled it off 50 years ago.
This year’s Division I unbeaten team is familiar to everyone with even the most casual knowledge of women’s basketball. It’s Connecticut. Again.
The Huskies have gone into the NCAA Tournament unbeaten nine times and followed up with the national championship on six of those occasions. They won 90 straight games in the late 2000s and 111 straight games in the mid-2010s.
Here’s the scary part this season: UConn’s average margin of victory is more than 38 points per game. None of this is to say UConn can’t lose. A ray of hope for non-Huskies fans: The last two times the Huskies made it this far unbeaten, they didn’t win the national championship. This year, they haven’t been seriously tested since a narrow win over Michigan in November. Teams who don’t have to battle for wins in the regular season may fold under pressure in the Final Four.
Coach Geno Auriemma, now finishing his 41st season in charge at UConn, would undoubtedly prefer that his team had faced tougher games this season. A preseason look at their schedule suggested that it wouldn’t be a cakewalk. But Tennessee, USC and Notre Dame all underperformed this year. The only top-tier opponent the Huskies faced from December onward was Iowa, who got a No 2 seed in the NCAA Tournament, but the Hawkeyes are a couple of seasons removed from their Caitlin Clark-fueled glory years. Auriemma will surely do his best to prepare the Huskies for a pressure-packed game finish.
But the teams who can give the Huskies such a game can be counted on one hand. In men’s basketball, No 1 overall seed Duke lost this year to Texas Tech and North Carolina, who earned No 5 and No 6 regional seeds respectively, and barely escaped the ACC quarter-finals while dealing with injury issues. The Blue Devils certainly could lose in the Sweet 16 or Elite Eight. In the women’s bracket, it’s nearly inconceivable that UConn could lose to anyone other than one of the other top seeds – UCLA, South Carolina or Texas. UCLA are 31-1, having lost only to Texas. South Carolina (31-3) and Texas (31-3) inflicted losses on each other in the regular season before the Longhorns won the rubber match in the SEC Tournament final.
One stat sums up how much less parity women’s basketball has compared with the men’s game: in the last 28 completed seasons, the women’s Division I champion has had a better record than their men’s counterparts.
A Connecticut women’s championship also wouldn’t be a surprise from a historical perspective. The Huskies have won 11 times from 2000 onward. Only eight other teams – South Carolina (3), Baylor (3), Notre Dame (2), Tennessee (2), Maryland, Texas A&M, Stanford and LSU – have won a national championship in that span. Men’s basketball has seen 13 different teams cut down the nets in that span and eight different champions in the past 10 tournaments alone.
Connecticut fans certainly enjoy their dominance. Fans at South Carolina, where Dawn Staley has built a program that has gone toe-to-toe with UConn since her breakthrough national championship in 2017, aren’t complaining, either. But is the sport as a whole better off when talent and championships are so concentrated among a small group of schools?
The NFL has a lot of mechanisms to instil parity, and it works – 20 different teams have lifted the trophy in the 60-year history of the Super Bowl, and only four franchises have never played in the big game. Even the NBA, in which one or two dominant players can create a dynasty (Michael Jordan with the Bulls, Stephen Curry with the Warriors), has had 14 different champions since 1994.
Generally, the healthier a sport is, the more competitive teams it has. Softball has been in and out of the Olympic program, in part because three countries accounted for 13 of the 15 medals awarded in the sport. Women’s ice hockey tournaments usually have two competitions – the USA v Canada for the gold, then everybody else for bronze. Women’s soccer’s World Cup is far more interesting now that several teams could win at any given tournament.
In college sports, men’s basketball has only grown in popularity since UCLA’s dynasty ended in the mid-1970s. Women’s soccer is no longer an annual parade for North Carolina, which is bad news in Chapel Hill but a good sign that the sport is now producing more championship-caliber talent than any single team can collect.
Like most college sports, women’s basketball is at a crossroads. The freedom of movement afforded by the transfer portal should provide some modicum of parity as players who get less playing time than they’d like can hop to a different school. On the other hand, athletes can now get name, image and likeness (NIL) deals, and it’s safe to say players are more likely to cash in at a marquee program like UConn than they will at a school that doesn’t get quite as many games on ESPN or quite as many fans in the stands.
Oddsmakers have installed the Huskies as overwhelming favorites to win the women’s tournament this year. Odds are pretty good that they’ll be favorites in many years to come. No one has the right to ask UConn to quit being so dominant. For the good of the sport, it’s up to everyone else to find the resources to get better.
