Why bigger is better for Texas women's basketball in this NCAA Tournament | Golden
Texas women's basketball is SEC-ready, which means the Longhorns are NCAA-ready in this day and age.
Reason being, they have bigs for days.
Freshman point guard Madison Booker is the straw that stirs the proverbial drink, but Texas’ sheer size represents a different way of conducting basketball business. The Longhorns wore down a talented but smaller Alabama team before a raucous house Sunday night that included a Longhorn legend at Moody Center.
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With Kevin Durant seated behind the bench, the Horns were bigger and better than their future conference opponent. The win was closer than the 65-54 final score suggested, but one cannot dispute that the Horns won going away because they wore down a smaller team en route to a third Sweet 16 appearance in four years under coach Vic Schaefer.
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With a crowd of 9,753 giving them massive energy, the No. 1-seeded Longhorns won all the big-girl stats on a night when only one of their guards — Booker, with 21 points — gave them scoring punch.
Points in the paint? Texas, 34-22.
Rebounds? Texas, 45-34.
Blocks? Texas, 11-2.
Schaefer never fails to mention that college basketball is a guard’s game, and one only needs to view the star power at play on a national level, starting with Iowa's Caitlin Clark and some sensational freshmen in Booker, USC’s JuJu Watkins and Notre Dame’s Hannah Hidalgo.
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But this time he added some big-girl spice to the knowledge drop.
“We talk about it all the time,” Schaefer said. “You win with guard play, but you win championships with guard play and good size. We’ve certainly been blessed with some depth.”
Vic Schaefer has a lot of options this year
So much depth that he was able to use the hook on reigning Big 12 sixth player of the year DeYona Gaston, who felt Schaefer's wrath in the opening quarter when she got off to a slow start with a missed layup and a pair of turnovers after replacing starter Taylor Jones, who had left briefly after getting shaken up.
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He inserted senior Khadija Faye, who knocked down a couple of free throws on one end and blocked a shot on the other. Amina Muhammad also gave the team some nice minutes. Gaston, who showed off her dance moves for the ESPN cameras on Selection Sunday, later returned and found her groove with a three-point play in the second half on her way to nine points, seven rebounds and two blocks.
Faye and Muhammad are solid reserves and Gaston is a boss first option who could start for a lot of programs, but the fact that Schaefer also has the 6-foot-4 Jones and 6-foot-1 forward Aaliyah Moore — who posted her fourth double-double with 21 points and 10 rebounds — on the front line is a luxury that many teams simply don’t have.
Alabama was overmatched inside
Andrea Lloyd was a 6-foot-2 forward and three-time All-American who starred on Texas’ undefeated 1986 national championship team. The Longhorn Network/ESPN color analyst has seen more UT games than just about anybody, so I couldn’t wait to ask her about the unique makeup of Schaefer's 2024 roster in what’s largely a guard-driven era of basketball.
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“He has this stable of five post players. All are different,” Lloyd said on last week’s "On Second Thought" podcast. “He can throw them in and out and rotate them. Nobody has that.”
As for the Crimson Tide, they are accustomed to going up against bigger teams as a member of the SEC, which includes the last two national champions in LSU and South Carolina, programs that dominate the paint most seasons. Dawn Staley led the Gamecocks to two Final Fours and the 2022 national title behind the play of 6-foot-5 All-America post Aliyah Boston. And before she led LSU to a championship with post Angel Reese leading the way, Kim Mulkey won three other titles at Baylor, two of them with All-American posts Sophia Young and Brittney Griner.
Alabama coach Kristy Curry, who coached at Texas Tech for seven years, has had her hands full with big teams this season, especially with a four-guard starting lineup that’s dependent on Ashlee Barker and Aaliyah Nye, both of whom stand 6-feet. Freshman post Essence Cody is 6-4, but it was tough sledding against Texas’ inside depth.
“I just think they’re so big and physical,” Curry said. “You can’t get to the free-throw line. You’ve got to play north-south. You can’t play east-west. You just have to credit them. They’re so big. They just run waves at you at the four and five spots.”
Clamping down on the Crimson Tide
The Tide just weren’t allowed to get any easy buckets, and while the aforementioned were responsible for 31 of Alabama's 54 points, it took 37 field-goal attempts to get there thanks to good perimeter defense from Texas’ Shaylee Gonzales and Shay Holle, who did struggle offensively with only two made field goals in 12 combined attempts.
Their offense wasn’t needed on Sunday, but it will be in this NCAA Tournament if the Horns are to live up to their No. 1 seed.
All told, the 32-4 Horns didn’t play perfect ball in the paint. They missed 15 of their 29 layup attempts, a number that will have to decrease as the competition gets stiffer, starting with the Gonzaga-Utah winner in Portland on Friday in the Sweet 16.
The Horns are bigger and now that the tournament is down to the final 16 teams. But the bigger will have to be even better for them to go dancing in Cleveland.
Texas in the Sweet 16
No. 1 Texas vs. No. 4 Gonzaga or No. 5 Utah, Friday, time TBA, Portland, Ore.
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Texas women's basketball showed why bigger is better against Alabama
