A new era of women’s basketball: Why Iowa’s upset of South Carolina is a sign of things to come

Regardless of what happened in the national championship game, and any way you want to analyze it — strategically, dynastically, commercially — Iowa’s 77-73 win over South Carolina on Friday night was a watershed moment for women’s basketball. And especially for the study of underdogs in the women’s tournament.

Way back on March 23, we claimed that this year’s tournament was already giving us the best brew ever of dominant teams and upset victories. And that was before Miami pulled off its second deep upset, to say nothing of the Hawkeyes’ Final Four shocker. Nine teams defeated opponents seeded at least three slots higher in this tournament, and the national championship game featured a 2-seed and a 3-seed. The women’s game has never seen anything like this level of chaos.

Neither analytics models nor betting lines gave Iowa much of a chance to end the Gamecocks’ 42-game winning streak. Our colleague Austin Mock pegged the probability of an upset as 7.2%, HerHoopStats said 16.6%, and South Carolina opened as a -675 favorite on the moneyline.

Dawn Staley’s crew played to its key strength as well as ever: SC had 26 offensive rebounds. In our Bracket Breakers analysis, hitting the offensive glass constantly surfaces as the single best thing a favorite can do to ward off a longshot. Grab offensive boards, and you amass possessions while preventing your opponent from getting into transition. And it worked! As Rebecca Lobo put it, every miss was like an assist for South Carolina. The Gamecocks took 20 more attempts from the field than Iowa.

Before we go on, a word about the Gamecocks’ style of play. In February, after Connecticut lost to South Carolina, Geno Auriemma, referring to UConn star Lou Lopez Sénéchal, said: “You can see the bruises on her body. It’s just appalling what teams do to her now. It’s not basketball. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not basketball.” Last week, Iowa Coach Lisa Bluder said that contesting rebounds against the Gamecocks was like “going to a bar fight.”

However you want to interpret each of those remarks and the dustups that followed, the statistical suggestion behind them is wrong. Size and force aren’t what generate offensive rebounds, at least not by themselves. In the men’s game, Kentucky led the nation in offensive rebounding percentage this season, but ranked just 88th in the country in average player height, according to KenPom.com. Meanwhile, Notre Dame was 41st in average height, but 357th in OR%. The overall correlation between average height and the rate at which teams grab their own missed shots was just 0.04, essentially none at all!

Could the numbers be a bit different in women’s basketball? Sure, and finding out what they are is another reason why we need to keep pushing for better data. But come on. Even in the game that got Auriemma so frustrated, South Carolina had a whopping 25 offensive rebounds to just 10 for UConn, but it was the Huskies who were called for more fouls (22-21). Physical play doesn’t translate into dominance on the offensive boards. Take it from Blaine Taylor’s biggest fan: that requires intelligence, strategy, positioning and teamwork.

As things turned out, nothing beyond the offensive glass went well for the Gamecocks on Friday night. At the shooting percentages they established this season, the Gamecocks should have had about 85 points on 77 FGA, not 73. South Carolina was 4-for-20 on threes and under 70% on free throws.

Meanwhile, the Hawkeyes kept threatening and shooting threes (40.4% 3PA/FGA, in line with their season numbers) even though the Gamecocks were allowing Caitlin Clark to get to the rim again and again (71.4% shooting from inside) and were a perfect 14-14 on foul shots. And it’s gone mostly unappreciated so far, but Iowa constantly disrupted South Carolina’s passing lanes, hassling the Gamecocks into 15 turnovers.

All of which means the formula for toppling a Goliath, even one as dominant as South Carolina, is similar to what we have found in the men’s game. Maximize the quantity and value of your possessions; force turnovers and open up your shooting. And pounce on any signs of overdog complacency. After overcoming first-quarter deficits to Maryland and Iowa, it was natural for the Gamecocks to believe they could impose their will on the second half of their game against the Hawkeyes. But halftime, media time outs and a couple of video reviews were all Clark needed to recharge her batteries, and South Carolina couldn’t match her touch. It was also natural for Staley to sit Aliyah Boston after the Gamecocks superstar picked up two quick fouls early in the game. But Boston ended up logging a total of only 25 minutes. South Carolina voluntarily sidelined its best player — and confirmed the thought that she needed to behave tentatively on the court. Why not just let her work her magic for as long as she could?

Statistically, Iowa’s upset of South Carolina is a classic case of what can happen when a giant plays at the bottom of its range and a killer (and its superstar) is at the very top of its game. There’s a lesson there, too: These teams’ Bell curves did overlap. Whether the Hawkeyes’ chances of winning were 7% or 17%, they weren’t 1% or 2%. It’s a little crazy to consider, but that’s where women’s basketball underdog chances resided not too long ago. When UConn was at peak dominance, the Huskies literally never lost; most of their games were like 1-16 or 2-15 matchups in the men’s tournament. This year, South Carolina was stronger than in its championship season of 2022. But so were LSU, Indiana and Utah (by a lot), and Iowa and Virginia Tech, and Stanford and UConn didn’t fall off. It’s not parity, but a new era of women’s basketball has arrived where at least half a dozen teams are contenders for a national title — no matter how good the best one looks — every season.

And that’s great for business. The base audience for women’s basketball has been growing for a while; last year’s South Carolina vs. UConn championship game averaged nearly 5 million viewers across ESPN’s networks, the most in nearly 20 years. But this time around, Clark vs. Boston, a South Carolina dynasty on the line, the relatively unknown field of the men’s Final Four — it’s all combined with greater exposure to ignite public fascination with the women’s tournament. The Iowa-South Carolina matchup drew 5.5 million viewers, with a peak of 6.6 million. And LSU’s triumph over Iowa for the national title was on ABC.

So far, as more talented players enter the game, disperse more widely around D-I and transfer more frequently, successful tournament underdogs have often been middle seeds that grew quickly into strong overall teams, rather than out-of-nowhere longshots playing high-risk strategies. Of the eight teams that beat opponents that were at least three seeds higher in this tournament, five were from power conferences: Colorado, Georgia, Miami, Mississippi and Mississippi State. As a group, these teams played slow, with an average rank of 174.6 in possessions per game, and were excellent on defense (average rank of 19.2 in schedule-adjusted defensive efficiency, according to our spreadsheets) and the offensive glass (26.4 in OR%). They were very good at forcing steals (47.8) but shot very few threes (300.8). They weren’t particularly reliant on free throws (104.4) or assists (141).

Of the three successful mid-major underdogs, Princeton fit this statistical profile, too. Florida Gulf Coast, however, stands apart, to an almost comical degree. The Eagles launch loads of bombs and don’t focus on offensive rebounding. Toledo, which put up 80 on Iowa, is also offense-first, though nobody shoots threes like FGCU.

As more upsets occur, a major part of our research will be to explore whether longshots cluster into groups, as they do in the men’s game. As more teams gain tournament dreams, will any build according to bracket-breaking concepts, whether it’s the long-range shooting we see from Florida Gulf Coast, pressure defense at Georgia or intense focus on the offensive boards like Mississippi?

That’s just one question we will be looking at during the offseason, as we keep gathering the data we need for a fuller Bracket Breakers model for the women’s tournament.

Thanks for sticking with the provisional analysis we’ve been able to offer this season, and please hit us up with comments about what you would like to see as we expand our research.

(Top photo of Caitlin Clark and Brea Beal: Ron Jenkins / Getty Images; Photo of Angel Reese: Maddie Meyer / Getty Images)