WWhen the Associated Press released its women's basketball rankings earlier this week, the top 10 were made up of a familiar crowd: No. 1 South Carolina, No. 5 Texas, No. 9 Stanford. Much further away, in 17th place, was Connecticut. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
The last time the Huskies were this low in the rankings, Bill Clinton ratified Nafta, Princess Di retired from public life and Schindler's List was on its way to conquering the Oscars. In falling to 17th in the AP poll, UConn completed a 357-week stretch in the top 15 — a streak that trails only Tennessee's 428 straight games. This comes five weeks after UConn opened the season behind top-ranked LSU. At the time, the idea of putting the most successful women's basketball program in history on a collision course with the defending champions didn't exactly seem far-fetched.
What happened? The basketball gods don't give with both hands, that's what. Not long after the team welcomed back 2021 Player of the Year Paige Bueckers, who was sidelined for much of the past two years with significant knee injuries, guard Azzi Fudd went down with a season-ending ACL injury – and that brought the total of Huskies on injured. reserve since the summer until four. Without these key contributors, Connecticut staggered to a 4-3 start. That all those losses came against ranked teams that are all now in the top five would hardly be a consolation for a program that hadn't lost three games this early in a season since 1980.
It's enough to make you think the unthinkable: that the Huskies could soon disappear from the AP poll altogether. “I think they all expected this year to be different,” coach Geno Auriemma told reporters this week, “that this year everything would disappear and everything would be behind us. And the response was, I think, a real punch in the gut. Like, 'I have to do this again.' I see that and I see their frustration, and they see mine, I think it's inevitable. You can't hide it.”
Connecticut shouldn't have bad years. In Auriemma's 30 years patrolling the sidelines, the Huskies have set an impossibly high standard with 11 national championships, six of which came in undefeated seasons. Once, not so long ago, they won 111 games in a row. They hoard the best players, play in the most watched games and compete for the highest stakes. They are the program against which all others measure themselves. Their reign in women's basketball is unlike any other in American sports. Only the twenty-year dynasty of the New England Patriots comes close.
The Huskies are not rebuilding; they reload. They graduate a generational player in Diana Taurasi and may get an even better player in Maya Moore. They're changing with the times, going from eradicating half-court possessions with Rebecca Lobo in the '90s to running and gunning with Breanna Stewart in the 2010s. They have a basketball culture that rivals that of the Miami Heat and a mystique about them that chastises some opponents before they even take the field. So dominant and so inevitable were the Huskies not long ago that some critics considered them bad for women's basketball.
The only threat to UConn's success, it seemed, was the 69-year-old Auriemma announcing his retirement. After all, that's how the run ended for UConn's great rival Tennessee. From the mid-1980s to the early 2000s, the Lady Vols were a powerhouse under coach Pat Summitt, winning eight championships. But after she resigned in 2012, the program fell to the SEC average. That opened the door for new challengers to come to the fore – not least South Carolina and LSU, who are coached by two of the game's best players, Dawn Staley and Kim Mulkey, respectively.
Overall, many of the former players and assistants that Auriemma schemed against are now leading major college programs, and the high school talent pool is bigger than ever. Connecticut is as much a victim of bad luck as of its own success. Colorado, Virginia Tech and Utah are three teams that would have struggled to crack the AP poll a decade ago. It's a testament to the growth of women's basketball that the college game has overtaken Connecticut in much the same way the world of soccer has overtaken the U.S. women's national team.
Still, as tempting as it is to take the bait and look ahead to the next UConn season, I've seen this movie before. In 2008, the Huskies were seemingly in rebuilding mode when they sneaked into the Final Four with a roster led by Moore, a freshman and sophomore Tina Charles. After falling to Stanford in the regional finals, they wouldn't lose another game for the next two years.
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Certainly, the Huskies' current fortunes look bleak. Nika Mühl, a games guard from Croatia, has seen nothing but struggle during her four years on campus. “I feel like these are the only cards we've been dealt since I've been here,” she told reporters. But there is still a lot of season to play for her Huskies. Even at their worst without Bueckers, they still won 61 games — and she has the potential to be as big a force for UConn as Caitlin Clark is for Iowa.
This is all to say: these dogs may be down there, but count them at your own peril.
