Countdown to Change in Women’s College Basketball: One Mississippi …

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Wait, maintain on a minute. Upsets like this aren’t presupposed to occur, particularly throughout the N.C.A.A. basketball event on the ladies’s facet.

On Sunday night time, on its packed dwelling court docket, a No. 1-seeded Stanford group fronted by a pair of all-People performed as if it had been struggling to study the fundamentals — layups and clever passing, to call two.

Mississippi, an eighth-seeded group laden with transfers, swarmed the court docket in waves, hitting nearly each essential shot and seeming to place a physique (or three or 4) on each Cardinal trying a shot close to the basket.

Mississippi by no means trailed. When Stanford, in the end, tied the rating within the remaining two minutes, Mississippi’s response was to clamp down even more durable on protection, forcing the Cardinal into turnovers. Remaining rating: Mississippi on high, 54-49.

What a sport. What a second for ladies’s basketball, the place a increase in gifted gamers and groups, together with elementary modifications in faculty sports activities, is including contemporary layers of aggressive parity.

When it was over, I watched the whole Mississippi group and its effervescent coach dance on the court docket and take photographs whereas standing on the Cardinal emblem lengthy after many of the dwelling group’s followers had left Maples Pavilion.

Stanford’s gamers had been left teary-eyed and surprised. “I feel I’m in shock,” mentioned guard Haley Jones, a third-team all-American. She and her teammate Cameron Brink, a second-team all-American this yr, had been N.C.A.A. champions in 2021.

However the shock didn’t preserve Jones from taking a wider view. This sport, she acknowledged in a information convention, had a deeper that means than most upsets.

“We hate to be those for it to occur to,” she mentioned. “But it surely says quite a bit about girls’s basketball to have an eighth seed like Ole Miss, as gifted as they’re.

“It’s positively development for the ladies’s sport.”

To say that such a loss is uncommon is to undersell it, particularly in girls’s basketball, the place expertise has usually been concentrated on the high and the shortage of depth within the sport has typically been uncovered in March.

Solely 4 high seeds had didn’t make it to the spherical of 16 within the girls’s event since 1994, when it expanded to 64 groups.

In contrast, 20 high seeds had didn’t make it to the ultimate 16 within the males’s event throughout that timeframe. The newest victims suffered the indignity of defeat simply final week: Kansas, which fell to Arkansas, and top-seeded Purdue, which absorbed one of many greatest losses in N.C.A.A. historical past when it succumbed to Sixteenth-seeded Fairleigh Dickinson, an end result that was on no person’s bracket.

Once I requested Mississippi Coach Yolett McPhee-McCuin concerning the that means of her group’s win for ladies’s basketball, she talked concerning the rising expertise pool.

“That’s what I used to be telling my group,” mentioned McPhee-McCuin, 40, who is likely one of the few Black girls main a group on this event and who’s beloved by her gamers for her nonstop power.

McPhee-McCuin, who is understood by her gamers as Coach Yo, mentioned she had been certain to focus her squad on Fairleigh Dickinson’s win over Purdue within the males’s event. “We’ve received to normalize that for the ladies’s sport,” she mentioned, noting that, in her view, girls are too typically conditioned to rein of their self-belief, which might make slaying favored opponents that rather more troublesome.

Coach Yo has no scarcity of confidence. She rotated a Mississippi group that in 2020 went winless within the Southeastern Convention, and made it clear on this journey that she represents change in girls’s basketball.

She introduced with out hesitation that she is a part of a brand new breed of younger, hungry newcomers who’ve deep respect for legendary friends like Stanford Coach Tara VanDerveer but in addition plan to shake up the established order. “I’m the way forward for girls’s basketball,” she mentioned boldly after her group trounced a tricky Gonzaga group by 23 factors on Friday.

The long run can be far totally different. The ladies’s sport is altering in seismic methods.

Extra information media consideration. Extra buzz within the stadiums. Extra capability crowds.

A half-century after Title IX, the landmark laws that led to better alternative for ladies and women in highschool and faculty sports activities, a number of generations of feminine gamers have performed the sport at a excessive stage, making a steadily enhancing stream of expertise.

Extra not too long ago, modifications in endorsement guidelines permitting gamers to revenue from their abilities have boosted the sport. Mississippi is likely one of the girls’s groups benefiting from a collective that pays a stipend to every participant.

Ten years in the past, it was unusual for gamers to switch. Now the foundations have modified, and motion is the brand new norm. Coach Yo is understood to say that she goes to the switch portal as if she had been buying on the grocery retailer.

Over the past two seasons, she has introduced in eight gamers from different colleges. On Sunday night time in opposition to the Cardinal, many performed vital roles, none greater than Myah Taylor, a glowing level guard who as soon as starred at rival Mississippi State and scored solely 3 factors however who led her group as if she had been conducting a symphony.

Can Ole Miss repeat this type of efficiency subsequent weekend?

Can different underdog groups duplicate it in future N.C.A.A. tournaments?

Allow us to hope.

A part of what makes the N.C.A.A. event so nice is the mixture of early-round upsets and last-gasp finishes, with upstarts knocking the wind out of higher-ranked groups.

These sorts of video games have been widespread in males’s tournaments. Assume Thirteenth-seeded Valparaiso, a faculty a lot of America has not heard of, knocking out … ahem, Mississippi, a No. 4 seed, on Bryce Drew’s last-gasp heave within the first spherical of the 1998 event.

Hopefully, the Mississippi girls’s squad marching into Stanford, undaunted and undeterred on the best way to victory, is an indication of issues to come back.

However who is aware of. Predicting the longer term in sports activities is usually a idiot’s errand, so after watching Sunday’s thrilling sport from courtside, I’ll simply say this:

Extra, please!