A sold-out crowd of 15,856 witnessed history on Sunday, as the Bruins of UCLA claimed their first NCAA national championship in women’s collegiate basketball over the USC Gamecocks in a dominant 79-51 score.
UCLA’s opening bucket came from their superstar in Lauren Betts and, from there, established a lead that the Bruins would never give up for the entire competition. The Gamecocks made a crucial mistake of allowing UCLA to shoot several open looks on the wings, which allowed the team to shoot 60% from beyond the arc in the first half. Ta’Niya Latson tried to swing the pendulum with a big steal in the paint late in the 2nd period to decrease their deficit to 11 points.
The Bruins and Gamecocks went back and forth to make the halftime score 36-23, which seemed feasible for USC to recover from if they could have generated a run in the 3rd. Unfortunately, UCLA jumped out to a 13-0 run in the 3rd period, which included a tremendous block by Lauren Betts on the floor. When you combine this with multiple instances of the Gamecocks having scoring droughts for 2 or more minutes, USC looked like a rudderless boat, unable to match the high octane intensity that UCLA brought to the floor for 40 minutes of play. With 6 players for UCLA scoring a minimum of 9 points and outscoring USC 25-12 on second chance points, the USC roster only had 2 players to match this stat, causing a complete collapse for their program on the national stage.
The 28-point victory marked the 3rd biggest margin of victory for a team in the NCAA Women’s Division 1 Championship game, surpassed by UCONN’s 33-point victory in 2013 against Louisville & UCONN’s 31-point victory in 2016 over Syracuse. Moments like this are (hopefully) not reflective of the future in the landscape of women’s college basketball, as Columbus is up next to host the Final Four with a desire to keep the competition within one or two possessions for the first time since the 2021 Stanford-Arizona showdown in Texas.
