More competition has caught up to UConn women, but state of the Huskies’ brand stays strong

Paige Bueckers, then a junior in high school, was one of thousands of fans at Nationwide Arena in Columbus, Ohio, when Notre Dame’s Arike Ogunbowale drained the buzzer-beating 3-pointer that ended the UConn women’s basketball team’s undefeated season in the 2018 Final Four.

That shot, launched from the left side of the arc with a second to go, is an electric memory for the Huskies’ senior as a fan, but for the team that night it brought unbelievable, nightmarish deja vu of the buzzer-beater that ruined the Huskies’ hopes of winning a fifth consecutive national championship in 2017.

Just the year prior it was Mississippi State’s Morgan William who drained a jump shot as time expired to eliminate UConn in the Final Four, 66-64, also snapping the program’s 111-game winning streak that remains an NCAA record in any sport, men’s or women’s.

UConn has not won a national title since, but Bueckers led the Huskies to their lone appearance in a championship game the last time she played in the tournament in 2022.

“Women’s basketball and women’s sports have always been great. It’s just now more people are getting to notice it and see that,” Bueckers said. “The growth has been huge … but to be able to play in front of Gampel in front of the best fans in the country is always a pleasure.”

Dose of reality

UConn’s legacy will always be defined first by the trophies: 11 national championships including four in a row from 2013-2016, 22 Final Four appearances, 29 conference tournament championships, an ever-growing list of first-team All-Americans whose numbers crowd the Wall of Honor at Gampel Pavilion. But since the legendary four-peat, the Huskies have seen streak after streak get broken.

Losses to Baylor and Louisville in 2018-19 ended five years of undefeated regular seasons. An upset by Villanova in 2022 was the Huskies’ first conference defeat since 2013, and 2021-22 and 2022-23 were the first consecutive six-loss seasons of Auriemma’s tenure. Then, with Bueckers sidelined for the season by an ACL tear, 3-seed Ohio State upset the 2-seed Huskies in the 2023 Sweet 16 to end UConn’s 14 consecutive seasons of Final Four appearances.

“I hate it if beating us is just another win on somebody’s schedule. I don’t want to be that,” Auriemma said on Selection Sunday. “But yeah, we’re not going into the tournament on a 111-game winning streak. We’re not going into the tournament as the No. 1 seed again. We’re not going in as the defending national champions … Talking about Portland and Albany, what gets lost in the conversation is you still have to win two games, so let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

The Huskies entered March Madness ranked lower than a 2-seed this season for the first time since 2005, opening their tournament as the 3-seed in the Portland 3 bracket against 14-seed Jackson State on Saturday, a game they won handily, 86-64. They still are hosting the first two rounds in Storrs, where the will play a second-round game against Syracuse on Monday at 6 p.m., but even UConn’s cross-country regional assignment signals a shift in status as the premiere draw for fans on the national stage.

There were legendary programs before the UConn dynasty began and there will be plenty more after Auriemma’s eventual retirement as he turned 70 on Saturday. But there is no question for Hall of Fame broadcaster Debbie Antonelli after 36 years covering women’s basketball: The Huskies are the blueprint.

“There were obviously other places that have won championships before, but there was this new age of television coming around, and putting games on television became so important,” Antonelli said. “The byproduct of winning was what I call the four Ps: Price, product, promotion and place … What (Auriemma) did, I think people have forgotten, and this is an important piece in the evolution of our game. And moving forward, they’re still at the top of their game.”

Starting to get attention

UConn exploded onto the national scene when Rebecca Lobo led the Huskies to their first national championship in 1995, but it wasn’t until Sue Bird and Swin Cash arrived in Storrs that Auriemma’s dynasty began to take shape. They led UConn back to the NCAA championship in 2000, then again in 2002 when freshman phenom Diana Taurasi joined the star-studded roster that also included Tamika Williams and Asjha Jones. Taurasi, considered one of the greatest college players of all time, made it three straight for the Huskies with titles in 2003 and 2004.

As accolades piled up, the world started to take notice. With ESPN headquartered less than 50 miles west of UConn’s campus, it was an easy trip for the biggest brand in sports television to watch the Huskies make history. Four titles turned into 11 as more legends passed through Gampel Pavilion over the decades: Maya Moore, Tina Charles, Breanna Stewart, Napheesa Collier — and now, Bueckers.

“I think one piece of it was geography and that’s the ESPN component,” Antonelli said. “That definitely helps because you have this incredible product on the floor and people that have decision-making power are watching it in their backyard. They can’t miss it, because it’s right there. (UConn) had more beat writers than anyone else covering their team, and then they get ESPN and all of a sudden, look what it is.”

The 2023 NCAA Championship game returned to network television for the first time since the Huskies won their first title in 1995 in front of 7.4 million viewers on CBS. ESPN took over broadcasting the championship in 1996 and later the Final Four in 2000, but viewership never approached the years when it was available to every household in the country. UConn’s 2002 victory over Pat Summitt’s Tennessee remains the most-viewed championship game on ESPN with an audience of 5.7 million.

Last year’s championship between LSU and Iowa on ABC exceeded decades of ratings on ESPN and surpassed even the peak of accessibility in the early 1990s. The game averaged 9.92 million viewers, shattering the previous tournament record of 8.1 million set in the 1992 Final Four game between Stanford and Virginia.

Auriemma doesn’t miss being the constant centerpiece of national conversation around women’s basketball, and the declining attention also helps shrink the target on his program’s back. Caitlin Clark leads Iowa into the tournament as one of the most famous — and polarizing — athletes in the history of the sport. Top-seeded South Carolina looks to build on the foundation of a dynasty after a second straight undefeated regular season. LSU is among the betting favorites to defend the national title as a 3-seed.

“Let them hate somebody else for once for being on the highlights on the shows,” Auriemma quipped with a grin on Selection Sunday. “You know, I used to get embarrassed when they would show those things. I would walk out and go please show somebody else. But when you’re at that level you get all the attention, and God bless ’em. They deserve it, and maybe we can sneak in there, too.”

But growth of the sport has been a double-edged sword for the Huskies.

Antonelli hasn’t seen UConn lose a step in recent years even though its results don’t show the same dominance of eras past. Instead, the rest of the country is more talented than ever before. The Huskies have two freshman starters who were both top-20 recruits, and neither is anywhere near the national conversation for freshman of the year against the likes of USC’s JuJu Watkins, Notre Dame’s Hannah Hidalgo or Texas’s Madison Booker.

Only one team, Virginia Tech, landed more than one player across the three AP All-American teams in 2024. A decade ago, two players apiece from UConn, Baylor, Notre Dame and Duke filled eight of the 15 spots.

“It’s not negative, it’s just that there’s more teams in the conversation. There’s more players at the card table that have enough money and resources to compete,” Antonelli said. “We’re also seeing a distribution of talent. There’s more All-Americans going out of high school and going to different places, not just all going to the top-tier programs.

“And there’s more on the top tier … (UConn) is still good. They’re in the hunt. There’s just more in the conversation, and that should make Geno proud. He’s been a huge part of building that.”

NIL and the transfer portal also make the single-year superteams and rapid rebuilds that disrupt dynasties more possible than ever before. Angel Reese led LSU to the national title last season after transferring from Maryland. Second-seeded UCLA, one of the favorites to come out of the Albany 2 bracket, is anchored by Stanford transfer Lauren Betts.

“It’s a confluence of things coming together at the same time. The product is good. The players have their own platforms with NIL deals and social media, so they use their own voice,” Antonelli said. “In a TV executive world years ago, we were just trying to build a few household names so we could get somebody to latch on. Now we have multiple household names that people are aware of because they’re paying attention … Our product has always been good, and now people are paying attention.”

‘Because UConn is UConn’

The Huskies never feel like underdogs on the court, for better or worse. Senior point guard Nika Muhl reacted instinctively to the idea with a wistful chuckle that seemed to say, ‘Wouldn’t that be nice?’ As Clark mania sweeps the new generation of fans, most current players and coaches came up watching the peak of the Huskies’ eminence, which means beating them is a milestone for just about everyone.

“It can be a narrative, and it can be true, which for us this year I think it’s definitely true … but people are never going to believe that,” Muhl said with a smile. “People are never going to feed into that, because UConn is UConn. We’re expected to win with two players on the court or 12 players on the court. It doesn’t matter … At the end of the day we are UConn, and people expect to see us win.”

That’s partly by design, because feeling the weight of that legacy is a fundamental part of Auriemma’s culture at UConn. He likes when players recognize the pressure that the program’s history demands and expects that they take pride in continuing it. Redshirt freshman Ice Brady said Auriemma is quick to remind the team that he’s been around the block more than a few times in his 39th season.

“Coach talks about it every day before practice. Literally every day,” Brady said. “He was saying that we have an opportunity this year because we are such an underdog. Normally the name UConn holds so much, but with the circumstances we are an underdog, so we’re going to have fun with that … We know what we’ve got and what we can do when we’re all on the same page.”

Even as a three-seed, even with five losses and no top-10 wins and a seven-man rotation and two rookies starting in their first-ever tournament, UConn has the fourth-best odds to win it all at +2000 according to BetMGM — better than two 1-seeds and all four 2-seeds.

The Huskies are the third-most popular national champion pick among entries in the ESPN Women’s Tournament Bracket Challenge. It’s not a huge slice of more than three million brackets entered, just 4.8%, but it’s an indication of just how powerful UConn’s brand remains among casual fans.

It remains among the competition, too. Last season Ohio State was the latest to prove that the Huskies aren’t invincible, but they are still never anything less than the team to beat. Jackson State coach Tomekia Reed opened her news conference Saturday, “It seems like every year we come and have to play the legends.”

“It almost looks like, is UConn in somebody’s shadow? Yeah, no. That’s not the case,” Antonelli said with a laugh. “I mean, who wants to see them on that side of the bracket? Nobody. You do not want UConn in your bracket.”