UConn hasn’t missed a beat since winning the national championship last season. Despite losing Paige Bueckers to the WNBA, UConn looks like an early championship favorite. Led by Sarah Strong and Azzi Fudd, UConn has been a two-way force, and only Michigan has been able to truly challenge the team all season long.
UConn does have some competition for the title, though. Texas established itself as a contender early on, beating UCLA and South Carolina in late November. Since then, Texas has also beaten North Carolina and Baylor. However, after a 70-51 win over South Dakota State University, head coach Vic Schaefer wasn’t happy with his team and issued a brutal wake-up call.
“One thing I’ll share with my team is, if we play like this on any other Sunday for the rest of the year, we won’t get beaten, we’ll get embarrassed,” Schaefer said in his postgame media availability. “I didn’t think we were very locked in from the time we walked into shootaround this morning, and then tonight in the game I thought we had some really poor shot selection. Rori [Harmon] was playing really hard defensively, and then we’d have one person resting, and when you play against a great player like the big kid for them, you gotta try to limit her touches, and you gotta limit her space. We were awful in both. Just horrible.”
Schaefer’s frustration after a 70-51 win raises the question: Can Texas really challenge UConn when it matters the most?
Texas gutted out the win
While Texas never lost its lead, it also didn’t manage to truly pull away until late in the third quarter when Madison Booker made a jump shot to stretch the lead to fifteen points. Before that, South Dakota State had always managed to stay relatively close, often within ten points.
The Longhorns didn’t score overly efficiently, converting only three of their twelve 3-point attempts, and sent the Jackrabbits to the free-throw line 21 times. Moreover, Texas wasn’t able to win the rebounding battle and let Brooklyn Meyer score 20 points on 6-11 shooting from the field. Meyer also got 11 of her team’s 21 free-throw attempts.
Texas’s key players need some rest
Texas has a few days off for the holidays, and the team’s key players need the rest. Jordan Lee, Madison Booker, and Rori Harmon all average over 30 minutes per game. Due to some injuries, Texas’s rotation has been thin lately.
Against UCLA and South Carolina, Schaefer played a seven-player rotation. He also only played three reserves—Justice Carlton, Kyla Oldacre, and Sarah Graves—for a significant time against the Pennsylvania Quakers. Against North Carolina, the rotation shrank back to seven players. Since then, Schaefer has mostly played an eight-player rotation, asking a lot of his key players.
Texas has some tough games coming up in the new year
Early 2026 is jam-packed with games against ranked opponents for Texas. Schaefer’s team will face Ole Miss, LSU, and South Carolina in January. February will feature games against Oklahoma, LSU, Kentucky, Vanderbilt, and Tennessee.
Those are the games Schaefer was referring to during his wake-up call. However, Texas already proved that it could beat top opponents. So, fans should expect the team to play up to its standard again once those games roll around. If they can’t, UConn may just cruise to another championship unless another team emerges as a true challenger.