So far in the 2024-25 NCAA women’s college basketball season, there haven’t been weeks of monumental shifts. A couple teams here and there dropping tough matchups, but all-in-all it has been mostly consistent.
That’s until last week.
Week 10 featured 13 of the top 25 in the country falling. It was a week of intrigue included a packed midweek schedule of close games and two matchups pitting top-10 teams against each other.
Here’s how the rankings look after the madness that came two months early.
AP top 25 women’s college basketball rankings:
- UCLA
- South Carolina
- Notre Dame
- USC
- LSU
- UConn
- Texas
- Maryland
- Ohio State
- TCU
- Kansas State
- Kentucky
- Oklahoma
- North Carolina
- Tennessee
- Duke
- Georgia Tech
- Cal
- Alabama
- West Virginia
- NC State
- Michigan State
- Utah
- Minnesota
- Oklahoma State
Others receiving votes: Michigan 43, Mississippi St. 22, Indiana 14, Creighton 12, Nebraska 11, Baylor 8, Louisville 5, Harvard 3, Mississippi 3, Florida St. 2, Iowa 1, Vanderbilt 1.
USC Outlasts Maryland, With Home on Their Minds
In the preseason, Big Ten voters chose the USC Trojans to win the conference. The Maryland Terrapins were ranked No. 4 in the same preseason poll, but that voting didn’t take into account a record start to the season for head coach Brenda Frese’s side.
Entering Wednesday’s matchup between No. 4 USC and No. 8 Maryland, the Terrapins had their third best start to a season, going 14-0. They welcomed the Trojans in their first East Coast road trip of the Big Ten calendar and Maryland nearly came away with the victory in a 79-74 USC win.
For all the justified hype surrounding USC sophomore guard JuJu Watkins, it was Maryland’s Shyanne Sellers who was the star of the show.
“I thought Shy [Sellers] showed what a tremendous senior leader she is and a big-time player,” said head coach Brenda Frese. “I thought we fed off of her confidence [and] her aggressiveness.”
Sellers led all scorers with 26 points, going 10-of-11 from the free throw line on a night where Sellers was more active in the paint. Defensively, Sellers and the Terps held Watkins to 21 points on 7-of-19 shooting, forcing a contender for National Player of the Year to foul out in the fourth quarter.,
However, the team effort of the Trojans was too much for the Terps. The two sides entered the fourth quarter tied and with 1:28 remaining, it was still that way at a 72-72 impasse. Breaking through it was senior transfer forward Kiki Iriafen.
It was the game-winning play for Iriafen on a night where the forward scored 21 points, grabbed seven rebounds and lead the Trojans with a +15 in her 28 minutes on the court.
Iriafen was one of five Trojans in double figures in the victory, with a big performance on the boards for Rayah Marshall, grabbing 15 rebounds (five on offensive).
Overall, the performance from USC had a lot to do with the other things on the team’s mind. As wildfires raged through the Southern California city, the Trojans had a lot to play through with not only Maryland but thinking about home.
“Maryland’s not going to play any different because of what we’re dealing with at home,” said Iriafen.
“I got a really nice text from our director of of marketing at home saying that your team provided us a good two hours of not thinking about kind of what’s going on,” said head coach Lindsay Gottlieb. “I think without really knowing it, that’s what this team does, right? We have a perspective that basketball isn’t everything but when these 40 minutes are in front of us that it’s everything to us in that moment.”
Shake Up in the Top-25
Of the 13 ranked losses this week, 10 came between Wednesday and Thursday.
Wednesday, it was three ranked matchups on the schedule. Before Maryland and USC, it was the No. 9 Ohio State Buckeyes traveling north to Ann Arbor, to face the No. 25 Michigan Wolverines. Freshman point guard Jaloni Cambridge led Ohio State with 22 second half points, erasing a 16-point second quarter deficit to defeat the Wolverines 84-77 and sending them out of the top-25.
The Big Ten was busy midweek, with the once-ranked Nebraska Cornhuskers defeating No. 20 Michigan State 85-80, the third defeat in four games for the Spartans.
In the Big 12, the No. 22 Utah Utes welcomed the No. 12 Kansas State Wildcats who stripped away any sort of home court advantage and then some. Center Ayoka Lee scored 14 points for the Wildcats, moving the graduate senior into the top-10 scorers all time in women’s college basketball. The Wildcats won 71-47, continuing to build a strong resume with their only defeat coming at the hands of the No. 13 Duke Blue Devils back on Nov. 25.
If people enjoyed Wednesday night’s games, Thursday blew them out of the water.
In the top-25, Thursday featured five games that were either decided by two possessions or went into overtime.
The No. 16 Tennessee Volunteers faced the No. 6 LSU Tigers and nearly came away with their first top-10 win under first year Vols head coach Kim Caldwell, if not for LSU junior guard Kailyn Gilbert. On the game-winning basket, Gilbert made an outstanding, circus, layup with one second remaining.
On the opposite end of the excitement spectrum, the No. 14 Duke Blue Devils faced off in a Tobacco Road rivalry against the No. 19 UNC Tar Heels. At halftime, the two sides were tied 16-16, highlighting the kind of basketball Duke head coach Kara Lawson has become famous four: low scoring and defensive. North Carolina and Duke needed overtime before the Tar Heels won 53-46.
The other overtime game in the ranking was in Atlanta. The No. 13 Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets lost 105-94 in double-overtime, but most importantly lost the services of outstanding freshman Daniel Carnegie. In the third quarter, Carnegie pulled up while running down the court, holding her hamstring. She missed the rest of the game and the Tech loss to unranked Louisville Sunday, in Kentucky.
A pair of ranked sides also fell Thursday night, with the Illinois Fighting Illini defeating the No. 23 Iowa Hawkeyes 62-57, who suffered another loss to unranked Indiana on Sunday. Then, the No. 10 Oklahoma Sooners lost to Mississippi State, giving the Sooners their second loss in as many weeks.
South Carolina Dominates Texas
Sunday featured only one matchup between two ranked teams, but it was a big one. No. 2 South Carolina welcomed No. 5 Texas to Columbia. It looked like a heavyweight pay-per-view style matchup leading into the game, but in the first quarter, the Gamecocks already sent the Longhorns to the mat.
Head coach Dawn Staley’s side went out to an 18-9 first quarter lead. Texas led the game for just over a minute, the first 1:27 of the game, and never earned another one.
South Carolina was relentless on defense, and although they were outsized by Texas, the Gamecocks didn’t give up on any plays and made any shot difficult for the visitors. Longhorns sophomore guard Madison Booker scored seven points on 3-of-19 shooting, always trying to get in a shot with a defender in her face. Forward Kyla Oldacre had double the number of offensive rebounds as the entire Gamecocks roster (12-6), but still only shot 5-of-11 from the floor, limited in clean opportunities for second chance points.
“We didn’t win the rebounding battle, but everything below that, like the extra effort, the we really concentrated on making sure they got no direct passes in their posts and not playing behind them in the times that we did play behind something bad happened,” said coach Staley. “So, we’ll clean that part of it up. But I’m just really proud of them because they are, they are playing together. They’re playing for Ashlyn [Watkins].”
It was the first ranked game for South Carolina since the season-ending ACL injury to forward Ashlyn Watkins, a key role player off the Gamecocks bench and 22-23 All-SEC selection.
The Gamecocks honored Watkins through stifling defense that held the Longhorns to 27.8 percent shooting from the floor. On the other side, South Carolina had their fourth game shooting over 50 percent (51.0 percent against Texas) against power conference opponents since falling to the UCLA Bruins back in November.
Sunday’s complete victory shows that their loss to the Bruins is a distant memory, and South Carolina is back on top as a national championship contender.
Other Stories of the Week
- No. 17 West Virginia lost their second conference game of the season this week, falling to unranked Oklahoma State, in Oklahoma.
- No. 24 Cal Golden Bears were on a tear this week, defeating the No. 21 NC State Wolfpack Thursday, plus a resounding win against the rising Florida State Seminoles Sunday. Cal held the nation’s top scorer, Ta’niya Latson to 13 points on 27.3 percent shooting from the floor, the only game against a power conference opponent this season where Latson didn’t score at least 20 points.
- No. 3 Notre Dame extended its winning streak to nine games this week, defeating Wake Forest and Clemson. The Fighting Irish haven’t lost since Nov. 30, but welcome the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets to South Bend Thursday.
