South Carolina women's basketball: Would the Gamecocks have won the 2020 NCAA Tournament?

Five years after a global pandemic dashed South Carolina’s championship aspirations, we use AI to simulate the canceled tournament and find out who would have won it all.

The 2020 NCAA Tournament is one of the great What-Ifs in Gamecock history, up there with Sindarius Thorwell getting sick, Marquez North’s miracle catch, and Navy.

South Carolina went 32-1 and finished the season on a 26-game winning streak. The only loss came to Indiana in the Virgin Islands, a game where Aliyah Boston, who learned earlier in the day that one of her favorite teachers had died, fouled out. 

During the winning streak, South Carolina won all but two games by double digits. The team set a (since-broken) record for blocked shots, was fifth in the country in rebounding, and was top ten on offense and defense. 

There were eight future WNBA Draft picks on the roster. Boston and Tyasha Harris were All-Americans, plus Boston was the national Freshman of the Year and Harris was the SEC female athlete of the year.

Harris provided the veteran savvy to balance the precocious Freshies, and Mikiah Herbert Harrigan, “Mad Kiki,” gave the Gamecocks their emotional edge.

Not only was South Carolina the consensus no. 1 team in the country at the end of the regular season, but the Gamecocks had a favorable tournament draw. South Carolina would have played in the Greenville region, meaning they wouldn’t have to leave the state until the Final Four in New Orleans.

But on March 12, the NCAA canceled the tournament. South Carolina’s second title would have to wait. 

The Gamecocks hung a banner in Colonial Life Arena recognizing the unanimous no. 1 team, but it wasn’t the same, and the banner is no longer there. Later, they included a hidden “2020” in the 2024 national championship rings.

We take it as a given in the Palmetto State that the Gamecocks would definitely have won it all (conveniently ignoring that we thought they were a sure thing in 2023 as well).

Everyone has opinions, so why not use artificial intelligence to create an unbiased simulation of the canceled tournament?

I used ChatGPT for my simulation. I used the final NCAA bracketology as the starting point and ran 1,000 simulations to estimate probabilities based on polls, strength of schedule, and RPI.

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Today, we’ll set the stage with the first two rounds.

Top 16 seeds
Greenville
1 – South Carolina
2 – NC State
3 – UCLA
4 – Oregon State

Portland
1 – Oregon
2 – UConn
3 – Northwestern
4 – Gonzaga

Dallas
1 – Baylor
2 – Stanford
3 – Mississippi State
4 – Iowa

Fort Wayne
1 – Maryland
2 – Louisville
3 – Arizona
4 – DePaul

As expected, most of the top seeds cruised to the Sweet 16. The most likely upsets were #12 Drexel over #5 Missouri State, #11 Old Dominion over #6 Kentucky, #10 Purdue over #TCU, #11 James Madison over #6 Ohio State, and #11 Tennessee over #6 Princeton.

Here’s the full bracket.

Next week, we’ll go through the rest of the tournament and find out who won and how.

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