NFL
By: Jeffrey Newholm
We’ve all seen it happen. From afar, we feel the athlete’s pain when another good-looking shot somehow rims out.
“There must be a lid on that basket!”
Happily, in the great year 2024, the net has never seemed largerin the NCAA women’s tournament. Dazzling hoopers Caitlin Clark, Paige Bueckers, and JuJu Watkins are electrifying gyms(and adding 0’s to the energy bill) to an extent previously unseen. In a new era of excellence and parity (one notable top bird aside,) women’s hoops continually reaches more excellent states.
To provide fans with their deserved knowledge level, Team NBSMedia returns to its trademark tournament preview format. Each region covers the top seed, analyzes the best underdog team, and selects the four advancing schools.
Albany Regional One
Top Bird: South Carolina
The referee hands the ball to the inbounder. The offensive team is down two. A three for the win…
Does life get any more exciting? It seemed so, truthfully, considering the Gamecocks’ Kamilla Cardoso had never made a three in her collegiate career!
South Carolina had reached the SEC Tournament semifinals, where their Tennessee foes needed but one more stop to fell the undefeated beast. Vols coach Kellie Harper created a zone defense that triple-dog dared (gasp!) Cardoso to take an uncontested shot.
The shot bricked and: bounced in?
The luck of the Irish no longer lives primarily in South Bend, although Notre Dame could meet USC in the Elite Eight. And it’s hardly luck to record a 32-0 record, the second-straight undefeated regular season for the Gamecocks.
Coach Dawn Staley quickly turned a yawn of a program into the country’s dominant team. Despite losing its top five players from last season’s Final Four squad, South Carolina flew to the #1 ranking within a week and hasn’t fallen since.
However, do note that the last three teams to enter the NCAA dance undefeated cruelly awakened from their dream in the semifinals. All it takes is one unfortunate, and unforgettable,ricochet to crush a person’s imagination of perfection.
As coach Harper, alas, learned about a zone’s invitation to defeat.
Best Under-Stag: Fairfield
Although Niagara required only one more score to win the MAAC Championship, Fairfield had the solace of knowing it would still…
Stop the scroll. You mean a 30-1 team needed to win to make the NCAA Tournament?
Indeed, due to a principle that no mid-major will ever know or understand, Fairfield required an automatic bid to make the field of 68.
The Purple Eagles set their play after a timeout. Niagara drove for the hoop, and….
Ran out of time? Oops! Perhaps the best luck Fairfield has or will ever receive. The Stags capitalized their second chance, bolting to a 70-62 triumph in overtime. Fairfield’s reward is: a 13 seed? ¡Ay, caramba! Another putdown to a developing conference and quickly-building basketball dynasty.
The Stags will just have to ruin the four-seed Hoosiers’ brackets with a first-round shocker.
Predictions
South Carolina: in magic marker. Predictions don’t go far in the NCAAW’s these days. However, much like the 1 in front of gas pump prices in the ‘70s, it seems inevitable that the Gamecocks will price out two underwhelming opponents.
Oklahoma: Team NBS Media isn’t about to put one foot on each side of the Stags’ first-round fence! It is a reasonable doubt, however, if a new dynasty is ready for a second consecutive upset.
Oregon State: Six-seed Nebraska fell to Iowa despite an albatross effort and Clark’s subpar afternoon. That shortcoming would bode illy against a survivor of the Pac 12’s final tussle. Texas A&M needs a bit more time in its resurgence before recording two upsets.
Notre Dame: Arike Ogunbowale won’t walk through the Irish hallway again. She doesn’t have to for Notre Dame to win two more games at home in its rapid return as an elite team.
Albany Regional Two
Top Bird: Iowa
One would presume that there’s no more superlatives left for college women’s basketball’s forever-leading scorer.
Team NBS Media will try anyway to give Caitlin Clark her deserved credit.
Totally- (insert your favorite extremely bad word here)-awesome.
A sharpshooting Clark filled stands across the Midwest with a barnstorming trip that captured the Big Ten Tournament championship. A tour whose quality hasn’t been seen or celebrated since Title IX was but a tear in the eye of the wronged sex’s prayerful eye.
Clark didn’t invent the logo-shot from midcourt. She does, however, make them with a regularity never seen outside ofGolden State. In her last attempt to win a national title, Clark and her balanced Hawkeye squad won’t accept anything less than the walnut and bronze champion’s trophy.
Best Under-Pilot: Portland
What chance would a 20-12 Portland team have against a Gonzaga school that had downed the Pilots 90-40 only two weeks earlier?
100%, because it already happened. Yes, the Zags zipped through the WCC undefeated. No matter. For the second consecutive year, the Pilots chained the Bulldogs in the tournament finale. Unlike Cardoso’s generous bank, Gonzaga’s backboard shot deflected wildly far away from the rim at the final horn in Las Vegas. The Pilots fly to a Kansas City arena to face an inconsistent Wildcats foe.
Does Portland have a chance at a host school’s arena? If a 90-40 defeat is an insufficient defeat sentence, so, also, is another business trip to a faraway campus.
Predictions
Iowa: Clark doesn’t make every shot, although one would think otherwise with the energy from each downtown dagger. However, she needn’t be nearly at her best, which she will probably play at anyways, to win in Iowa City.
Colorado: Pac 12 claims another upset victim as Buffalos’ charge grounds Pilots.
LSU: The Tigers didn’t need motivation to reach the Sweet 16 as defending national champions. They received it, regardless, with a three-seed.
UCLA: Creighton underwhelms as a potential opponent in Los Angeles and UNLV’s Mountain West schedule proves to be insufficient training.
Portland Regional Three
Top Trojan: USC
Isn’t it, upon further reflection, a shame to be ahead of schedule in class?
“Professor, I finished my paper!” “Good for you, here’s the next assignment.” D’oh! There’s always another task for the too-speedy student.
In basketball, however, spiting the ever-defiant skeptics always puts one on the Dean’s List.
USC, decades removed from its Lisa Leslie-led glory era, returned to Mount Olympus before Zeus had time for any more sexist quackery. (Like, perhaps, thinking Watkins needed another year before winning a conference championship.)
The Trojans blackened Stanford’s seemingly pristine Cardinal in the last Pac 12 basketball game. Despite a 2-of-15 shooting night by Watkins, USC handily bested Stanford 74-61.
USC isn’t just a football school.
As the women rightfully proved with their top seed, the ballers proved mightier fighters as Pacific coast basketball sunsets into a new, conglomerated conference setting.
Best Under-Husky: UConn
“Under” anything may be a difficult sales spiel for a three-seed! When that team had seven players available for its final two games, however, Connecticut fans needed more nerve-calming coffee than usual.
With Buecker’s basketball glamor blinding opponents once more, another bracket with quick and unhappy exits could beckon in Storrs and Portland.
Although Ohio State could await in the Sweet 16, the Buckeyes would have a more challenging task with more capable point guards womaning UConn’s backcourt.
It’s curious how in previous editions of this preview, it was Connecticut, not South Carolina, who led the top region. UConn, due to its seven injuries, is evicted from its penthouse and sentenced to a kennel in the basement.
Which may just mean that tenants need the emergency stairs as Bueckers leads her Huskies on a rampage back to the Final Four.
Predictions
USC: Watkins’ first taste of the Big Dance whets instead of sating her appetite.
Virgina Tech: Top hooper Elizabeth Kitley’s injury could create an unusually difficult journey to the Sweet 16. Five-seed Baylor’s shine, however, is quickly fading.
UConn: A Syracuse or Arizona Final Four rematch would create a clever headline in the second round, but not the same intensity.
Ohio State: The Buckeyes avoid its near-misstep in last year’s first round, although a one-sided loss to Maryland in the Big Ten Quarterfinals could be a portend.
Portland Regional Four
Top Longhorn: Texas
The Big 12, once Baylor’s playpen, enters a more competitive era. Just in time, of course, for Texas to leave as the university chases more football dollars.
Because football, evidently, is such an entertaining sport compared to women’s basketball.
Longhorn coach Vic Schaefer, who ended UConn’s 111 game winning streak while at now-middling Mississippi State? He has the common sense to refute that inferiority notion.
Freshwoman phenom Madison Booker led the Longhorns to the Big 12 Tournament championship as Texas wrecked its opponents via a 30-4 record.
ESPN amusingly projected adjacent videos of the Longhorns’and Cardinal’s viewing parties at the waning moments of its selection special.
A Big 12 champion against a Cardinal team that couldn’t best Watkins on the least-awesome day of her career?
No contest. The Longhorns properly earned the one seed.
Best Under-Volunteer: Tennessee
Again, don’t be surprised enough to drop the phone. The Vols, who have made every NCAA tournament, are a trending upsetpick?
The late Pat Summitt, forever the first NCAA basketball coach to earn 1,000 wins, did more for women’s basketball than perhaps no other individual.
The Vols were favored in most of Summitt’s games, at least aftershe built her program in a regressively sexist area (see her book, Sum it Up, for confirmation). After her retirement, however, Tennessee has not returned to the Final Four.
The sad silence in the once-boisterous hallways in Knoxville, however, changes to song once more.
True, Cardoso’s cruel dagger seemed to set the program back. It’s not an inevitable defeat that marks a woman’s worth, however. It’s how she, even more surely, rises to stare down at bigotry’s small shadow.
Coach Harper brewed a winning concoction from a Vol cocktail too-long banished from the Top 25 buffet table. Will…
Golly, enough questioning the first great dynasty of the NCAA era! The Volunteers’ second success-period is here. It’s enough to best four programs without a giant’s shoulders to stand on.
Predictions:
Texas: The Longhorns have more than enough size to outmuscle Drexel and either Alabama or Florida State.
Gonzaga: The Zags are, properly, still hosting its first two games despite its Las Vegas bust. 30-3 isn’t a cute story from a supposedly lesser conference. It’s a culmination of years of excellence.
Tennessee: No more “maybe again, someday.” Summitt’s too-long-delayed justice legacy bears fruit now.
Stanford: Repeated postseason heartbreaks could project another shocker. That scenario appears implausible on the first weekend.
