After winning its first two NCAA Tournament games by an average of 33.5 points, the UConn Huskies looked every bit like the class of women's college basketball in 2009, well on their way to a national championship that appears increasingly inevitable with each lopsided victory its adds to its still unbeaten ledger. But if the remaining teams in the field are indeed just playing for second, they will at the very least be in for an interesting race.
Compared to the men's tournament, where only one Sweet Sixteen qualifier defeated a higher-seeded opponent in the second round, the women's draw was a bit more tumultuous. As a result, when the regional semifinals tip off tomorrow, there will be more No. 4 seeds competing than No. 1s and as many No. 6 seeds as there are No. 3s.
Among the casualties of the topsy-turvy opening rounds were a number of traditional heavyweights: the LSU Tigers, a fixture of the last five Final Fours; the North Carolina Tar Heels, a team that had reached every Sweet Sixteen since 2004; the Duke Blue Devils, who became just the sixth No. 1 seed to lose a second-round game in tournament history; and, in perhaps the biggest surprise of them all, the Tennessee Lady Volunteers, whose first-round loss to the Ball State Cardinals represented the two-time defending national champions' earliest tournament exit ever.
Taking the place of some of the sport's perennial powerhouse programs are a couple of squads who, in some cases, are going beyond their past achievements on the national scene to date. Fresh off a pair of blowout victories in the first two rounds, the Cal Golden Bears are headed to the Sweet Sixteen for the first time in program history. Another No. 4 seed, the Iowa State Hawkeyes, advanced past the second round for the first time in eight years after cruising through its portion of the Berkeley regional.
Once more, the tourney is colored by the presence of four teams seeded sixth or lower, two of whom reached the Sweet Sixteen with the benefit of home-court advantage. Playing before a crowd that included members of their men's basketball team and its coach Tom Izzo, the Michigan State Spartans, seeded ninth in the Berkeley regional, pulled off a 63-49 upset of Duke and former coach Joanne McCallie in East Lansing, Mich. Meanwhile, the enigmatic Rutgers Scarlet Knights, who plummeted from being the preseason No. 3 team in the nation to the seventh seed in the Oklahoma City regional come tournament time, seemed to regroup before a raucous home crowd in Piscataway, N.J. en route to an 80-52 victory over the second-seeded Auburn Tigers.
With so many relative newcomers and unexpected contenders remaining in the tournament field, the race for second certainly has no shortage of storylines. How long each of these upstart squads can hang around, however, depends on how they'll fare against some of the stiff competition that awaits them beginning tomorrow. Though some of the sport's most storied programs have been sent home, the top five teams in the most recent AP Top 25 are all still alive, and in the coming days, they'll give some of the tournament's Cinderellas their biggest challenges yet.
The winner of Sunday's matchup between Rutgers and the sixth-seeded Purdue Boilermakers, for instance, could very well be headed for an Elite Eight showdown against the nationally ranked No. 4 Oklahoma Sooners, who will have the benefit of playing in Oklahoma City, a mere half-hour drive from their Norman, Okla. campus. Similarly, the winner of tomorrow's four-nine matchup between Iowa St. and Michigan St. could be on a collision course with the national No. 2 Stanford Cardinal, which hasn't lost a game since Jan. 18.
Also in the thick of it all are the Maryland Lady Terrapins, the AP's third-best team in the country, a top seed in the Raleigh regional and winners of the title in 2006. Joining the Lady Terps in their bracket are the national No. 5 Baylor Lady Bears, which could provide for a heavyweight showdown to determine which squad will punch its ticket to the Final Four in St. Louis.
If the first- and second-round results are any indication, it would perhaps be shortsighted to assume some of this weekend's underdogs can't at least give their higher-seeded opponents a run for their money. But as to whether any of the remaining teams can compete with the vaunted Huskies, there's not much reason for optimism. While UConn will certainly face more difficult challenges than those posed by the Vermont Catamounts and the Florida Gators, the Huskies have proven to be at their best when playing the best, beating ranked teams by an average of almost 30 points per game during the regular season.
Thus, in a year where the Huskies are so far and away the best team in college basketball, the excitement from this year's NCAA Tournament will likely come out of the race for second place.
