NC State women's basketball deserved a better fate

NC State women’s basketball earned a lot of respect on social media Monday evening after taking part in a classic, a 91-87 double-overtime loss to Connecticut in the Elite Eight round of the NCAA Tournament.

But the Wolfpack deserved more than that.

This senior class deserved a Final Four to its credit, but fate was just not on NC State’s side.

Two years ago, with then-junior Kayla Jones breaking out, then-sophomore Elissa Cunane emerging as a star and a senior point guard in Aislinn Konig, NC State won the first of what became three consecutive ACC Tournament titles.

Four starters on that team were starting for NC State Monday night in Connecticut — Cunane, Jones, Kai Crutchfield and Jakia Brown-Turner. Konig, who plays professionally in Europe, joined them in the first five, with valuable depth in seniors Kaila Ealey and Grace Hunter, among others.

That team was 28-4 after winning the ACC Tournament, and on its way defeated top-10 Maryland during the regular season. The Pack was set for a nice NCAA Tournament run, but the COVID-19 pandemic changed everything.

A year later, with Raina Perez transferring in from Cal State Fullerton and replacing Konig at point guard, NC State was 20-2 entering the 2021 NCAA Tournament, once again champions of the ACC. The Pack had knocked off then-No. 1s South Carolina and Louisville, both on the road, during the regular season. For good measure, NC State beat Louisville again in Greensboro in the ACC Tournament.

But on a team that did not have as much depth as the year before or the season after, Jones, a first-team All-ACC selection, hurt her knee in the NCAA Tournament opener. That injury loomed large when NC State lost by three to Indiana in the Sweet 16.

This season all five starters were back, and now there was depth to go with it. The stars aligned, except for when Connecticut star Paige Bueckers, the national player of the year in 2021 as a freshman, hurt her knee in December.

Ultimately, that started a domino effect that once again did not put fate on NC State’s side. Connecticut, with a healthy Bueckers, is a one seed. The Huskies would have been a No. 1 seed in Bridgeport, Conn.

And in that scenario, NC State likely would have been the No. 1 seed in the Wichita, Kan., region.

Instead, losing four games without Bueckers caused UConn to slide to the two-seed line. That did not cause them to slide out of the Bridgeport region.

As NC State and Connecticut put forth a performance that was universally hailed on social media, to the point that even South Carolina head coach Dawn Staley tweeted “You WBB haters take that!!,” the questions grew louder about the fairness of top-seeded Wolfpack playing a de facto road game against a No. 2 seed.

“Great game but terribly unfair that NC State had to play this one on the road despite being a 1 seed,” USA Today’s Dan Wolken tweeted.

“Lol I still can’t believe this game is being played in Bridgeport,” Nicole Auerbach of The Athletic added.

Even former Clemson football sports information director Tim Bourret opined: “In 2030, when ESPN does its show on the Greatest Injustices in Sport in the decade, #1 seed NC State having to play #2 seed UCONN in Connecticut (where UCONN has not lost an NCAA game since 1993) will be near the top of the list.”

Perhaps the best two summarizations came from Luke DeCock of the News and Observer and Matt Fortuna of The Athletic.

DeCock tweeted that Monday was the “best game of March, any gender.”

“A shame a No. 1 seed has to play a road game against the biggest fan base in the sport. With such fine margins in this one, it mattered,” DeCock added.

Then Fortuna noted the ill fortunes of NC State athletics in the postseason during the past nine months.

NC State postseasons the past 9 months:

-Baseball has a COVID forfeit in the College World Series

-Football has the Holiday Bowl canceled on the day of the game

-Women’s basketball plays against UConn in Connecticut despite being a 1 seed

— Matt Fortuna (@Matt_Fortuna) March 29, 2022

NCAA Women’s Tournament Selection Committee Chairwoman Nina King, also the director of athletics at Duke, insisted Tuesday morning in an appearance on the ACC Network’s Packer and Durham that the committee stuck to seeding principles and rules when filling out the bracket.

“Of course that’s something, UConn being placed in the Bridgeport Region as a two seed, something that we talked about,” King said, referring to Connecticut being in Bridgeport. “There is no conspiracy theory behind it. We didn’t put UConn there to disadvantage anybody else. We followed the bracketing principles and procedures relative to selection and seeding. We don’t want to adjust anything to compromise the integrity of the process.

“That’s the way that it worked out this year, after kind of following step by step the way that we select and seeding and ultimately bracket teams.”

It is important to note that King is not the individual decision maker for the entire bracket. The committee chairperson is really a glorified spokesperson for a collective body of deciders, thus animosity should not be directed at her.

And also, the women’s tournament is changing next year to two regionals instead of four. King added that they will further look at more changes in the interest of fairness, noting, “Everything is on the table.”

“We don’t have to keep doing things the way they have been done,” King said.

But Mark Packer, co-host of the show, said it best Monday night.

“The game has advanced to the point that a home court advantage should be discarded by the committee,” Packer tweeted.

Staley and Stanford’s Tara VanDerveer have been outspoken in leading the charge to unbundle the women’s tournament from the NCAA Championships package with all other sports and sell its TV rights on its own.

The hope is that the tournament is worth enough in value so that economic considerations are no longer a factor. With all due respect to King, it’s hard to believe that sending Connecticut to Bridgeport was anything but a business decision.

Whether or not NC State beats Connecticut on a true neutral court is unknown. UConn still has Bueckers after all. But it took Bueckers making her first six shot attempts and all six of her free throws in the two overtimes for Connecticut to pull it out.

And in the Final Four, if UConn beats Stanford, it would face either South Carolina or Louisville. Over the past two years, NC State has split with the former and beaten the latter three straight times.

And what we saw Monday was further validation that this group of NC State women’s basketball players was Final Four worthy.

Fate intervened to prevent that from happening for them.

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