On the rise for years, the Pac-12 this season staked its claim as the country's best league. Can it win another title before it's lost to realignment?
The phenom came out of the locker room with 25 points, but murmurs emerged from the stands as Watkins sank basket after basket to start the second half.
No single conference influenced the upper echelon of the 2024 women's NCAA tournament bracket more than the Pac-12. USC -- which beat Stanford again last week to win its first Pac-12 tournament title since 2014 -- earned its first No. 1 seed in nearly four decades. Pac-12 teams made up a quarter of the top 16, with USC, No. 2 seeds Stanford andearning the right to host early-round games when the tournament opens Friday. Seven Pac-12 teams are in the bracket, tying the league record.
The uptick in television exposure created a sense of accountability."All of a sudden," Oregon State coach Scott Rueck told ESPN,"you needed to be good at women's basketball because it was on TV, and people were paying attention." And the more new programs did well, the more others felt they could join the party -- or needed to keep up. When coaching jobs opened, schools tended to look for proven winners with experience building winning cultures.
The quarterfinals were so stacked that Gottlieb posited the double-overtime Oregon State-Colorado matchup was practically an Elite Eight game. Their semifinal the next day against UCLA? Basically a Final Four meeting, Gottlieb said -- at least,"I hope we're not facing a team as good as UCLA prior to that."Charlie Creme breaks down his forecast for Oregon State's NCAA tournament prospects.
Watkins' impact is undisputed. She's the country's second-leading scorer and presumptive national freshman of the year. At the time of her commitment, when 2023's top recruit decided to stay home in Los Angeles, the once-iconic Trojans hadn't made the tournament since 2014. They haven't made it past the first weekend of the tournament since 1994, with Lisa Leslie.Now the Trojans have captured their first No.
Coaches are looking forward to fresh opponents in new leagues, new styles of play to scheme against, new cities to explore. But reality set in as the lasts came around. The weekend Watkins scored 51 marked Gottlieb's final trip to the Bay Area. USC associate head coach Beth Burns, who briefly worked at Stanford in the 2000s, went for a run on the Palo Alto campus only to wonder whether she'd ever return.
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