South Carolina WBB wins 3rd national championship, downs Iowa 87-75

Dawn Staley has officially established her dynasty. On Sunday in Cleveland, South Carolina women’s basketball won its third national championship since 2017 and its second in three years.

The Gamecocks ran the table, finishing 38-0 on the season by polishing off an 87-75 victory in the title game against National Player of the Year Caitlin Clark and the Iowa Hawkeyes. This was the second straight season that Iowa made it to the final game, and the second straight season that Clark and Co. will head home without the grand trophy.

Clark will now head off to the WNBA this summer as arguably the greatest college women’s basketball player of all time. She finished with 30 points, eight rebounds, and five assists in her final college game.

As for South Carolina, Staley has built something special in Columbia that doesn’t appear to be going away any time soon. The Gamecocks withstood an early run from Iowa by calmly coming back in the second half. Kamilla Cardoso posted 15 points, 17 rebounds, and three blocks. South Carolina dominated the glass (51-29) and had seven players score at least six points.

How did it all go down? Let’s dive in.

CHAMPIONS 🤙 pic.twitter.com/ss4G4HpVOS

— South Carolina Women's Basketball (@GamecockWBB) April 7, 2024

There’s a portion of the Internet that owes LSU’s Hailey Van Lith an apology. There isn’t a player in all of women’s college basketball who can completely shut down Clark — not for a full 40 minutes, at least. 18 first-quarter points for Clark against the Gamecocks — a championship game record — proved that once again. At one point, she also had 13 straight for Iowa as it was all Hawkeyes early on, taking a 27-20 lead into the second quarter.

We all knew South Carolina, which entered as a 6.5-point favorite, would fight back though. The second frame couldn’t have gone any better for Coach Staley’s squad. South Carolina’s defense locked in, especially on Clark, who had just three points in the second. The Gamecocks took its first lead of the afternoon midway through the quarter and finished the half on a 5-0 run.

Iowa played 19.5 minutes of excellent basketball, but a couple of untimely missteps down the stretch put them into a 49-46 hole at the halftime break.

The game began to slowly slip away from Iowa in the third quarter. South Carolina’s defense became impenetrable, holding the Hawkeyes to a mere 13 points in the frame on 29.4 percent overall shooting and a poor 1-9 mark from deep. Clark added just four more points after her red-hot start in the first period.

South Carolina nearly ran away with it to start the fourth, too. The Gamecocks’ lead peaked at 14 points with 7:40 to go in the game. But Iowa responded. Fueled by a Clark triple, the Hawkeyes cut its deficit down to six just a couple of minutes later and then to five soon after that. But that was as close as Iowa would get, ultimately falling by 12 points to the team that played like the best group in the country all season long.

Kentucky fans can take some solace in knowing that losing to South Carolina this season wasn’t uncommon. While you never want to lose a pair of games by a combined 110 points (which Kentucky did this season against the Gamecocks), Staley’s squad beat its opponents by an average of nearly 30 points per game throughout the 2023-24 campaign.

That’s just straight-up domination. No one was immune, not even the future top pick in the WNBA Draft.

But with Kenny Brooks now in charge of the Wildcats, the Big Blue Nation can at least dream of building something similar to what Staley has at South Carolina. It’s gonna take time and energy and money, but the Gamecocks started from the bottom of the league and rose to the top.

Why can’t Kentucky do the same?