South Carolina women’s basketball suffered its second-largest NCAA Tournament loss in program history in the 2026 national championship game.
The No. 1 seed Gamecocks (36-4) lost 79-51 to No. 1 seed UCLA (37-1) on April 5 at Mortgage Matchup Center in Phoenix.
The 28-point loss sits just below the Gamecocks’ 29-point loss to UConn in the Elite Eight of the 2018 NCAA Tournament.
The margin is the third-largest ever in any NCAA championship game.
“I think we could score about 70 on any given day,” South Carolina coach Dawn Staley said. “… Shots were short. I thought we didn’t really do a good job at making extra passes … We took the first shot available. Sometimes that shot didn’t go in. A lot of times that shot didn’t go in.”
The 51 points were the fewest South Carolina has ever scored in an NCAA Tournament loss and the second-fewest they’ve scored in any NCAA Tournament game.
It was also the seventh-fewest points scored by any team in the NCAA Tournament championship game.
South Carolina shot 29% from the field, the third-lowest in any national title game and its lowest mark of the season by 5.3 percentage points.
The Gamecocks’ shooting performance started poorly from the jump. South Carolina shot just 3-for-18 in the first quarter, scoring just 10 points.
Joyce Edwards, the team’s leading scorer this season, was 0-for-3, and center Madina Okot, who shot 58.1% on the season, was just 1-for-5.
“I thought the first quarter, first half, we had a lot of people taking shots that aren’t normal for us,” Staley said. “So we didn’t do a good job of getting the people that probably was supposed to get some better looks the ball. But I think UCLA had a lot to do with it.”
South Carolina improved in the second quarter, scoring 13 points on 6-for-17 shooting, but then came out cold once again to start the second half.
In the third quarter, the Gamecocks scored nine points on 3-for-14 shooting from the field. No player scored over two points in the period. It’s the third-fewest points scored in the third quarter and fifth-fewest of any quarter in a national championship game.
“In the first quarter then second and third, we had time to recover but we didn’t,” Okot said. “By the time the third quarter ended, I (thought) ‘Maybe it just was not our day.'”
Tia Reid covers Jackson State sports for the Clarion Ledger. Email her at treid@usatodayco.com and follow her on X @tiareid65.
This article originally appeared on Greenville News: South Carolina performance one of worst in NCAA title game history
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