I've been following women's basketball since the Diana Taurasi days, and my heuristic / belief over the years has been that there are only about ~8 legit teams in the country in any given year, who get all the top recruits and have legitimate chances at upsetting the big guns / winning it all. Some of those names change year to year, some of them stay the same, but the early tournament games seem to much more typically resemble UConn's 140-52 first-round blowout than the quality we've seen. Whereas, I think the men's field is a lot deeper, and the quality margin between the very top teams and the next tier or two being a lot smaller. So I only really watch the Women's tournament once it gets to the Elite 8, with not much more than a passing interest the first 3 rounds. But once you get down to those 8 teams, man, they can really fuckin play, and they give up nothing to the men in terms of mental toughness or teamwork. And you also don't have the one-and-done NBA dynamic that makes top men's teams more of a franken-team, where you hardly know some of the key players and they feel almost like stand-ins with no personal story attached.
edit: My impression is that in the 80s and 90s, that list of legit contending teams may have been even smaller, so frankly, 8 is pretty good. The effectiveness of Geno's machine has waxed and waned since then, but in the years when UConn isn't a total hegemon, I think the list of schools who are in the mix has grown a bit. Which is good for the game, of course.
In the past 5 seasons, the UConn women have lost 3 games. 188-3. Those three losses:
Nov 17, 2014 - Lost at #6 Stanford, 88-86 in OT. Stanford made a three pointer in the last second of regulation to send the game to OT. That loss broke UConn's 47-game winning streak.
Mar 31, 2017 - Lost to #2 seed Mississippi St, 66-64 in OT in the national semifinals. MSU made a tough shot at the buzzer to win the game in OT. That loss broke UConn's 111-game winning streak.
Mar 30, 2018 - Lost to #1 seed Notre Dame, 91-89 in OT in the national semifinals. ND made a very tough shot with 1 second to go to win the game in OT. That loss broke UConn's 36-game winning streak.
So basically, here's the formula for beating UConn over the last 5 years:
(1) Have a great team yourself.
(2) Play about as well as you can possibly play.
(3) Have UConn not play as well as they can play (or even, as was the case last year, play poorly).
(4) Get a few breaks.
(5) Hit a crazy shot at the buzzer.
And if all that happens....Maybe you'll beat them by two points.
That's how good UConn is. It takes basically an alignment of the planets in order to beat them. And if you do, you BARELY beat them.
