Once the confetti fell and the Big East conference champions exited the building, the hoops remained fully intact at Mohegan Sun Arena on Monday night
Connecticut famously does not cut nets for accomplishments other than a national championship, which makes plenty of sense when they come as furiously as they do for the Huskies. The bar of expectations is in the clouds, and the Huskies are solidly back in the rarest of air, to which only they have gained entry.
Advertisement
The reigning champs enter the NCAA tournament on the fifth-longest winning streak in NCAA history. It’s the 11th time they’re undefeated at this point; in six of those years, they won the title. Add in another six, and they’ve won a record 12 national championships since 1995. They’re odds-on favorites to make it lucky 13.
From the outside, it looks like sorcery to sustain so much success. At least, Shea Ralph thought so as a 2000 national champion and Most Outstanding Player. Then she saw behind the curtain as an assistant coach for 13 years, during a stretch that included 12 consecutive Final Fours and six championships.
“What was really cool about that whole experience to me was it’s not magic; it’s not rocket science,” Ralph, now the head coach at Vanderbilt, told Yahoo Sports’ Hoops 360. “It’s not like you go to UConn and they sprinkle magic fairy dust and bam, you’re an All-American and [win] a national championship. I know they make it look that way, which speaks volumes about what they do, because it’s really, really hard. But it’s also very simple.”
Shea Ralph (center) was both a player and assistant coach under Geno Auriemma, and carried a lot of his principles to her team at Vanderbilt. (Photo by Jeff Zelevansky/Getty Images)
(Jeff Zelevansky via Getty Images)
For much of the 2020s, the dark arts overtook Storrs, and nothing seemed easy. Injuries decimated their rosters, limiting the crossover of back-to-back No. 1 recruits Paige Bueckers and Azzi Fudd. The Huskies dropped back-to-back games (gasp) for the first time since March 1993. The Final Four streak ended at 14 years, and the Elite Eight at 16.
Advertisement
In their absence, the concentration of power in women’s hoops moved back south. South Carolina became a Final Four regular with five straight berths beginning in 2021. The Gamecocks won the 2022 national championship in a rout of Bueckers’ UConn squad, and the 2024 trophy without losing a game while competing in the tough SEC. They became the first undefeated national champions since UConn’s record 111-game winning streak spanned the 2015 and 2016 title seasons.
The Huskies, never down for long, returned the favor and sped out to an 82-59 victory in the 2025 national championship last year in Tampa. Bueckers exited in the fog of a storybook ending that snapped the program’s nearly decade-long drought without a national championship.
Because that’s how accomplishment is measured in Storrs, the home of 27 All-Americans and 50 WNBA Draft picks. It’s not magic; it’s a recipe of elite talent, institutional experience and coaching expectations.
“There’s just a level of buy-in and simplicity that I love about the culture,” Ralph said. “It doesn’t have to be so thick and complicated with words and messages. It’s just, do you want to do this or not? And this is what it takes. And then you’ve got to get people there who will do whatever it takes.”
Ralph knows better than believing in a fantasy; she helped develop that who’s who of All-Americans, an honor she also earned as a player at UConn. As an assistant, she worked with 21 WNBA Draft picks, including nine top-five picks and No. 1 overall picks Tina Charles, Maya Moore and Breanna Stewart. Stewart won four titles in four years, the standard Bueckers wanted, but couldn’t reach.
Advertisement
She worked with Bueckers, the first freshman to sweep the major national player of the year awards, and recruited Fudd before leaving for her first head coaching job at Vanderbilt in 2021. Fudd and sophomore Sarah Strong are All-American contenders leading one of the deepest — and most certainly healthy — teams that UConn has seen in recent years.
Fudd, a redshirt senior who played sparingly while dealing with injuries, opted to stay at UConn one more year before the WNBA Draft. She came into her own in a second healthy season, becoming what most expected when she ceremoniously committed to the Huskies. The 2025 Final Four Most Outstanding Player is averaging career-highs across the board (17.7 points, 2.6 rebounds, 3.0 assists, 2.5 steals per game, shooting 49% overall and 45.1% from 3). In the season’s tightest game, a 72-69 win over Michigan, she scored 31.
“Coming off last year … I think the confidence has just continued to grow with us individually, but as a team,” Fudd said during the Big East tournament. “So I feel like we’re in a great place.”
Advertisement
Sarah Strong, the 2025 Freshman of the Year, was the backbone of their title run and earned both Big East Player and Defensive Player of the Year. A standout two-way player, Strong packs the box score every night, averaging 18.5 points, 7.6 rebounds, 4.1 assists, 3.4 steals and 1.6 blocks in 26.4 minutes per game.
“It’s a lot of God-given [talent],” Auriemma said at the Big East tournament. “How does somebody know how to hit a hundred-mile-an-hour fastball, you know? They just can. And she does things because she can. She’s just really, really smart, really intuitive, and big enough that you can’t bully her and quick enough that you can’t out-quick her. So it’s a rare combination, for sure.”
She’s shooting 60.1% from the field, 42.7% from 3 and 87.3% from the free throw line and finished the regular season a few made free throws away from the first 60-40-90 season in WNBA, NBA and college basketball history. She ranks first in each win share category, player efficiency rating and wins above replacement player, per CBB Analytics.
KK Arnold more than sufficiently stepped into the point guard role left by Bueckers, and Nika Mühl before her. The junior ranks in the 99th percentile in assist-to-turnover ratio and steals. Serah Williams, a senior transfer from Wisconsin, gives them size. Freshman Blanca Quiñonez missed a few games early, but is now averaging a fourth-best 9.9 points per game with 2 steals and 2.1 assists coming off the bench.
Advertisement
“It’s different in that we have more ways that we can play,” Auriemma said during the Big East tournament. “We have more bodies that can contribute. And I think [the players] maybe alluded to it also, defensively we’re able to be more disruptive than we have been in maybe the last 10 years, given what we’ve been through. So it’s a much different team than it was last year.”
They led both ends of UConn’s third-most dominant scoring margin season in Division I history. They defeated opponents by an average of 37.8 points in the regular season, trailing only themselves. The 2015 UConn team leads all Division I programs at plus-40.6, and the 2016 roster averaged wins of 39.7. The most interesting conversation around UConn all year is how this roster could possibly be better without Bueckers, an all-WNBA honoree as a rookie, at the helm.
“I’m not of the opinion that we’re better,” Auriemma said. “We’re different. So there is no are we the same, are we better, are we worse. We’re different, and we play a different style of play than we played last year. The results seem to be kind of the same as they were last year, just a different way of going about it. And when we’re on our game, we’re as effective as we were last year at this time, for sure.”
The Huskies collected record wins over rivals and legacy programs Notre Dame (plus-38) in January and Tennessee (plus-30) in February. The Lady Vols are the last team to beat them, 80-76, on their home court on Feb. 6, 2025. UConn’s 67-point win over DePaul in December was a season high and the most in the matchup, easily overtaking a 47-point win in 2013.
Advertisement
Few have given UConn a closely contested challenge. Michigan lost by three back on Nov. 21, while Louisville, Villanova and Marquette are the only others to keep within 25. The latter two were in a four-day span last month.
It’s as close to a wake-up call as can be for UConn, which won its 12th consecutive conference championship and 31st overall last week. That’s too many cut nets to spare. And it’s a luxury no other elite contender is offered.
“That’s one of the things I respect so much about UConn, actually, is that they don’t get tested at all for so many months and then they go in and play so well [in the NCAA Tournament],” UCLA head coach Cori Close said after Michigan nearly ended the Bruins’ own dominant undefeated Big Ten season. “Because I’m thinking to myself, we’re winning these games by too many points. There’s not enough pressure to [allow] our players to learn to internalize that, process that and play through that.”
Advertisement
The Huskies torched UCLA by 34 in the 2025 Final Four. Close and the Bruins were inexperienced on the big stage in their program’s first appearance on the final weekend. The two-time Big Ten tournament champions are now one of the Huskies’ largest obstacles, boasting a veteran top six led by 6-foot-7 center Lauren Betts, the reigning Naismith Defensive Player of the Year, and a plethora of shooters around her.
The two are expected to be the No. 1 and No. 2 true seeds, respectively, on a course to meet in the championship game on April 6 in Phoenix. Texas, the SEC tournament title winners, are projected at No. 3, leading a legion of conference talent prepared for a Final Four run. LSU and Vanderbilt, led by Ralph, could sneak into the final weekend.
And there’s South Carolina, the powerhouse that did not play UConn in the regular season for the first time since 2013-14. After the SEC title game loss to Texas, head coach Dawn Staley told her group that the last time they didn’t win it, they went on to become the final team to cut the nets. That’s all anyone truly wants this time of year, and no one has been better at it than UConn.
