Joe Paige | Sports Editor
While UConn's men's basketball team won another national title on Monday, the women's road to a title has ended as Caitlyn Clark and the Iowa Hawkeyes knocked them out of the Final Four 71-69. The game headlined two of women's college basketball’s biggest stars with Caitlyn Clark for Iowa and Paige Bueckers for UConn going head-to-head in what would be one of the most watched games in NCAA tournament history.
This was a very even matchup between two powerhouse teams, while Iowa has truly been dominant all season, if there’s any team capable of mitigating Caitlyn Clark’s unstoppable offensive game, it would be UConn. The Huskies started the game with an aggressive man-to-man defense trying to make scoring for Iowa as challenging as possible.
UConn would try to take away Clark’s range early, forcing her to constantly look for other options, Clark ended the first quarter scoring only 2 points and the Hawkeyes with 8 turnovers to start the game. UConn finished the first quarter leading 19-14, Clark ended the first half with no 3-pointers made, a first for the Wooden award-winning sharpshooter.
In the third quarter, Iowa came out with an impressive offensive turnaround, in about 2 minutes Iowa would have the game tied 36-36. In Iowa’s previous game against LSU, Clark finished the game with 41 points, but against Connecticut, she would only end up with just 21 points. Lots of credit goes to Aaliyah Edwards and Nika Mühl’s effort on defense, this certainly had to have been an even more emotional game for them as seniors in their last year at UConn.
It would be the ending to this game’s fourth quarter, that would be one of the most talked about moments in the whole NCAA tournament. Aaliyah Edwards would be called for an illegal screen in the final seconds of the game after colliding with Iowa's Gabbie Marshall just as Paige Bueckers was about to potentially shoot a shot that could have given UConn the lead.
Connecticut head coach Geno Auriemma was visibly upset towards the refs during the call, Auriemma gave his thoughts on the call in his postgame conference:
| "There's probably an illegal screen call that you could make on every single possession. I just know there were three or four of them called on us and I don't think there were any called on them. So I guess we just gotta get better on not setting illegal screens."
Although Connecticut may have fallen short of advancing to what would have been their 13th NCAA final, this is still a season UConn should be proud of. Next season, with just 8 games left, Geno Auriemma will have the chance to pass head coaches Mike Krzyzewski and Tara VanDerveer to become the winningest head coach in D1 college basketball history.