Mississippi State women's hoops earn 13th NCAA Tournament berth
For the second time in Sam Purcell’s three years, Mississippi State women’s basketball is dancing.
Sam Purcell’s Bulldogs earned a selection to the 2025 NCAA Tournament as the No. 9 seed in the Los Angeles Regional. The Bulldogs are paired up with No. 1 seed USC and will play No. 8 California in the first round on Saturday.
An upset through the first two rounds would send the Bulldogs to a Sweet 16 in Spokane, Wash. This year’s Final Four takes place in Tampa.
The selection is the 13th in school history for the Bulldog program. It’s the seventh in the last nine opportunities for State. It’s the sixth time in school history that the men and the women have both made the tournament and the Bulldog men heard their name called earlier on Sunday as the No. 8 seed in the Raliegh Regional and will take on Baylor on Friday.
Under Purcell, MSU went to the NCAA Tournament in year one with a First Four selection that ended with the Bulldogs advancing to round two after a win over Illinois and then Creighton before falling in a close battle with host Notre Dame.
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Purcell and the Bulldogs missed out on the tournament last year as one of the last four teams out but advanced to the Women’s Basketball Invitation tournament where they fell to Penn State in the Quarterfinals. This year’s team has run off a 21-11 record and finished 7-9 in SEC play. It’s the third-straight season that State has won 20 or more games and Purcell is the first coach to accomplish that in his first three seasons.
The Bulldogs have won three of the last five games coming into the tournament with one of those being a 68-64 loss to No. 1 Texas and the other an SEC Tournament defeat in the second-round last week to Ole Miss. Nine of the 11 losses this season came to NCAA Tournament teams.
State hasn’t had a season full of marquee wins, but the Bulldogs haven’t had many bad losses, either. The Bulldogs go into the tournament having gone 5-1 in neutral site games and have wins over tournament teams Oklahoma, Utah and Vanderbilt. The SEC landed 10 teams in the tournament.
Tournament times and streaming should be announced shortly.
