DALLAS — South Carolina came into Friday's game as a defending champion. Undefeated. The nation's best defense. A wire-to-wire #1 team who received all but one of the first-place votes in the AP poll all season*. And, accordingly, a 12-point favorite to reach their second-straight NCAA championship game.
*the lone rogue first-place vote went to Indiana, in the February 20 poll, six days before... well, you know.
Iowa itself was never any slouch this season, not with the force of nature that is Caitlin Clark commanding the court, giving the Hawkeyes a fighter's chance against anybody — well, anybody outside of the impervious Gamecocks, of course.
Right?
"I'm so proud of my women because I think they're the only people that really believed," head coach Lisa Bluder said after Iowa's monumental 77-73 victory Friday night. "I don't think anybody else, unless you were in black and gold, believed that we were going to win that game."
Maybe Bluder's exaggerating or oversimplifying that statement a touch. Victorious coaches tend to do so.
But what makes Iowa's victory — and this season, this team -- so remarkable is that the Hawkeyes didn't need anyone else to believe. They had an audacious gameplan on both sides of the ball, three years of camaraderie in the starting lineup, and a mental edge that's got them 40 minutes away from the promised land.
"I think the biggest thing is knowing how much my teammates trust me," said Clark in the aftermath of her scintillating 41-point performance. "I was given the ball in kind of the biggest moments of the game on the biggest stage, but also at the same time, my teammates really came through and played huge minutes."
Those words may sound a bit strange from someone who took 31 of her teams' 57 shots from the field, but it can only be true on a night where the Hawkeyes led for nearly 36 minutes of game time and held last year's National Player of the Year, SC center Aliyah Boston, to 8 points on 2-for-9 shooting in 25 foul-plagued minutes.
"Everybody did their role," Clark said. "That's what our team is about. Knowing your role, doing your role, and showing up in that every single day. I might score the most points, but at the end of the day, we're aren't anywhere without my teammates," Clark said.
Despite South Carolina's imposing size and depth, Iowa center Monika Czinano got free for 18 points on 6-for-8 shooting from the field — and rarely through posting up. Instead, Iowa exploited the Gamecocks' tendencies and manufactured layups off of pick-and-rolls all night.
"All the credit goes to my teammates," Czinano said. "I couldn't really do what I normally did and just post-up down there. I had to come out and set ball screens and try to expose the screen-and-roll, and I think that worked out pretty well for us."
“The pick-and-roll worked so well because they couldn’t be in 'help' — they couldn’t leave our shooters," said backup center Addison O'Grady, who was pressed into 10 minutes of action, just two off her season-high. "We didn't get as many threes as we normally do, but that's because they were worried about our shooters."
And on the defensive end, from the first minute to the last, Iowa sagged far, far off South Carolina's guards, inviting them to shoot three-pointers instead of trying to throw it into a paint clogged with defenders. It worked: South Carolina shot just 4-for-20 from behind the arc, including 1-for-12 in the first half as the Gamecocks struggled with Iowa's steadfast refusal to take defenders away from the post.
“It was really awkward, honestly," said Kate Martin with a laugh after the game, describing the 10-foot cushions she and the team routinely offered the Gamecocks. "I played (South Carolina guard) Brea Beal in high school and she’s made threes in my face. I was like, ‘this feels wrong,’ but we trusted in the coaches’ gameplans and that’s what you’ve got to do."
With all due respect to the departed Luther Vandross, tournament basketball rarely comes down to one moment — shining or otherwise. Maybe a game culminates in a shot, one last heave as the clock ticks irretrievably down. It makes for good television, at least.
But these Hawkeyes don't talk about a moment — they talk about the moment, and specifically staying in it. And that mental discipline is exactly what they needed to accomplish a task as herculean as beating South Carolina.
“When they’re getting rebounds over you and you’re trying to box out, you’re like 'all right, so what, now what'," said Martin. "If you dwell on the past you can’t focus on the next play, so we always try to stay mission-focused and worry about the task at hand, and that’s the next play — getting a stop or going down and getting a bucket.”
In a sport like basketball, with dozens of possessions and dozens of opportunities to make or miss a play, the "so what, now what" mantra the Hawkeyes have adopted is as catchy as it is necessary. Though the phrase came to the program from a sports psychologist the team works with, it goes through the coaching staff and down to the players, and the buy-in is plainly evident on the court.
"if you want to really see a team, you look at Coach Bluder and what she's built here at the University of Iowa," said Clark. "They're teams. And that carries you a really long way."
Associate head coach Jan Jensen credited the team's mental toughness after the game. "They’re just consistent," Jansen said. "They just manage the emotions, manage some tough calls, manage a couple turnovers at the wrong time, manage the run. That’s what I really liked."
Jansen also sees Martin's fingerprints on the team's embrace of the moment. "When she started to play and could really lead, she was really steady, she’s just like ‘stay in the moment’," said Jansen. "Keeping them here, but not in a ‘STAY IN THE MOMENT!’ — that’s different from 'stay in the moment, we’re good'.”
And, as always, it comes back to Clark. Her dribble drives regularly beat South Carolina's defenders, putting a level of stress on the bigs that the Gamecocks have simply not had to contend with all year — and didn't look comfortable with at any point Friday.
That ability to get into the paint paced Clark's scoring, and fortunately so, as her deep shooting was off for most of the night. "I'm 5-for-17, that's not too hot," Clark said. "I probably could have made a few more."
That may be a frightening thought for LSU fans hoping to see a cooldown from Clark on the scoreboard Sunday.
But with that below-average performance from three-point land came a 10-for-14 day from inside the arc, most of which were layups. In fact, Iowa finished 17-for-21 on the day on layups, an astonishing and unexpected result against that vaunted Gamecock defense.
Unexpected by anyone outside of the black and gold, of course.
Inside the program, they expected to be here, and they expected to win. "You’re here for a reason: your destiny," Jensen said of her message to her players. "You’re destined to be a Hawk. You’re destined to be right now in this moment.”
And for the Hawkeyes, 40 minutes away from the glory that only a national championship can bring, that moment is now.
