00:00UConn, South Carolina comes with a couple of storylines.
00:03I will, and I'm not stealing, but I thought Andrea Carter of the ESPN broadcast
00:09made an interesting point of, I wonder if it was on purpose, the Geno antics,
00:15because instead of talking about UConn getting dominated,
00:19we're talking about Geno kind of losing his mind a little bit.
00:24Where did the Geno-Don Staley coach battle land for you?
00:33Kevin, she was so spot on with this, and that's the immediate takeaway that I saw.
00:40I want to take you people back a year, and I want to work my way forward really quickly.
00:45Come on, remember, last year, South Carolina was the presumptive number one team in the country,
00:49and if people remember, UConn went down there to Columbia and beat them down.
00:55I mean, beat them down, Kevin, to the point where you were like, whoa,
00:59that's when people remember the title market flipped from South Carolina being an overwhelming favorite
01:04to be a national champion to UConn.
01:06But what happened? UConn did it again in the finals.
01:09Don's got a lot of pride. You know what I'm saying, Kevin?
01:12She was a Philly kid. She's Philly tough, and she's going to have her kids ready to play.
01:18And I want people to understand this, and hopefully this will make sense from a coaching perspective.
01:27You are a coach of a very physical team.
01:31UConn is about finesse and skill.
01:36South Carolina is about athleticism and sheer toughness.
01:41Like, we're tougher than you.
01:43When you get your kids ready to play, you have to let your kids know, hey,
01:50you got to do this based on how the referees let you play.
01:55And Dawn's intensity towards her players and towards the officials can sometimes skew games in her favor.
02:05Remember, there's nothing wrong with what Dawn Staley did.
02:08It's gamesmanship.
02:10And if Dawn Staley was too much with the officials, like Gino Auriemma said at the end of the third
02:15quarter,
02:16they would have banged and they would have teed her up.
02:18Now, Kevin, we also know that in order to get teed up in a national semifinal,
02:22you got to do a whole hell of a lot worse than probably Dawn Staley said or did to get
02:27teed up.
02:28So, South Carolina's game was at their advantage, the physicality.
02:33And here is where UConn ran into trouble.
02:38I hate to say it because I love some of these coaches.
02:41I'm friends with some of them.
02:42It's called the Big East.
02:44It's called that they don't get challenged enough throughout the totality of the season.
02:49They don't see South Carolina's physicality.
02:52They don't see LSU's athleticism.
02:54They don't see the guard play of Vanderbilt.
02:56They don't see that in the Big East.
02:58Kind of like we saw Gonzaga just look completely out of themselves when they were in the tournament
03:04because the WCC, it's a different animal when you get to the big dance.
03:09So, that is what happened.
03:10Plus, you also had a team in South Carolina that looked at UConn and weren't scared of UConn.
03:16And they took it to them.
03:18So, what happens then?
03:20Gino goes to the cameras and their third quarter and he does his turn.
03:26Which is he rips the officials in front of Holly Rowe.
03:29If you notice, Kevin, there were some quick whistles.
03:31Boom, boom, boom.
03:32Early third quarter.
03:33I think Edwards picked up like two or three fouls early in the fourth quarter
03:36that you thought maybe would swing the game.
03:39Didn't matter.
03:40The referee still didn't have enough time to, you know, balance it out.
03:44And they just allowed you, South Carolina, to play physically.
03:49So, you're right.
03:50And I just want to give people the coach's context of what I saw watching the game.
03:55It's very simple.
03:57We should be celebrating.
03:59And I mean celebrating the beatdown that Don Staley gave Gino last night.
04:05We should be.
04:07But we're not because Gino smartly moved it off to getting his you-know-what kicked
04:13to cheat and shake hands and I'm going to take the bad guy.
04:16And that's also Gino.
04:18That's also Gino in a way, folks, I'm going to say it differently,
04:21protecting his kids because they got their tail kicked last night.
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