TAMPA, Fla. — Once is a fluke, twice is a pattern, anything more is a problem.
South Carolina women’s basketball started slow on Friday, again. The Gamecocks were flat offensively off the opening tip, again. For the fourth consecutive NCAA Tournament game, they found themselves down seven or more points.
Friday’s rally in particular was not nearly as stressful as the wins over Maryland or Duke in Birmingham, a furious charge through the rest of the first half to take a lead into the break and eventually cruise to a 74-57 victory over Texas in the National Semifinal.
“It’s something that we shouldn’t be used to,” Te-Hina Paopao said. “But we are used to it. And we catch ourselves down in the first few minutes of the game but we know we’re going to get back. We played great defense. They were just making better shots and tough shots, which is what we want them to do.”
Now it’s a one-game season, a National Championship game against UConn Sunday at 3 p.m. ET on ABC. South Carolina took these slow starts to the absolute extreme in last year’s National Championship Game, going down 10-0 off the tip against Iowa and trailing for nearly the entire first half.
It is possible to continue walking the tightrope, to go down in the first round of the fight but get back up before the ten count.
But right now, everything exists in the context of UConn. There is nothing after Sunday, and anything associated with this team’s performance has now been crammed into one simple box.
Can it beat UConn?
“We turned the ball over a lot in the first,” Dawn Staley said about the sluggish starts. “I think we had like nine, 10 for the half, and then we only ended up turning it over three times the rest of the way.”
And if anyone knows that South Carolina has not survived a slow start every single time, it is UConn.
In February’s meeting at Colonial Life Arena, the Gamecocks had their usual slow start. Turnovers, missed shots, leaving some shooters open.
UConn led 21-14 after the first quarter, a more than familiar position for South Carolina to find itself in.
Not only was South Carolina unable to know it will “get back” as Paopao says, it completely lost the game before halftime. The Huskies ballooned their advantage to a dozen before the second quarter was two minutes old, then 17 in another 90 seconds and 20 another four minutes later.
You can survive a 10-point deficit early. A 20-point deficit just erodes the second half into prolonged garbage time, as the Gamecocks learned in February.
“We have to stay calm,” Bree Hall said. “And remember we have defense to rely on.”
South Carolina feels like it is a different team now. The regular season debacle against the Huskies was seven weeks ago, and the Gamecocks have beaten everyone since. That game was rock bottom, and everything else since has been a steady improvement in the hope of getting back to this point.
Now the one opponent South Carolina knows it can’t afford to start slow against is waiting on the bench. A team more than capable of scoring into the 70s or 80s even if South Carolina defends well will force the Gamecocks to put this potential offensive renaissance to the ultimate test.
You can’t win a National Championship in five minutes, but you sure can lose one. South Carolina lived this once, and finally can prove it learned its lesson.
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