KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The Secretary of Defense can rest a little easier.
Mississippi State women’s basketball coach Vic Schaefer might not admit it after his team defeated No. 3 seed UCLA 89-73 in the championship game of the NCAA tournament’s Kansas City Regional at the Sprint Center. Still, it’s hard to deny the defense Schaefer questioned so many times earlier in the season played a key role in helping MSU (36-1) punch its ticket to the Final Four for the second-consecutive season.
The key stretch came in the second quarter, when MSU limited UCLA (27-8) to 2-for-12 shooting (16.7 percent) to build a 42-26 halftime lead. The Bruins shot 10-for-31 in the second half (32.3 percent), which was the second-lowest shooting percentage in the first half this season.
“Mississippi State’s game plan was to pressure us and try and get the ball out of my hands and Japreece (Dean’s) hands, and I thought in the beginning of the game we kinda had a little lull where we couldn’t run anything or execute on the defensive end,” UCLA senior point guard Jordin Canada said.
The Bulldogs covered every area of team defense to lock the Bruins down. Teaira McCowan was active on her help, hedging high off screens to limit the UCLA ballhandlers’ space. Like she has all season, Blair Schaefer took a charge on Lajahna Drummer. Roshunda Johnson got into the act, too, by taking another one on Drummer.
McCowan was active on the glass, snaring one of her career-high 21 rebounds with one arm. In fact, it looked like the 6-foot-7 junior center cupped the ball somewhere near her bicep after swooping in to collect it.
McCowan added a blocked shot — one of her four on the night — on Monique Billings and another solid hedge off a screen to keep the Bruins off balance.
“They made two shots in the second quarter,” MSU coach Vic Schaefer said. “I was excited until the 2.8 seconds left when we gave up the baseline out of bounds play to cut it from 18 to 16. But you’re up 16 in an Elite Eight game, I wasn’t going to fret about it too much.”
UCLA coach Cori Close praised MSU for its ability to use its defense to make her team uncomfortable. She said a lot of teams in the Pacific-12 Conference played zone against UCLA, which left the Bruins to be the ones to make teams uneasy on defense. On Sunday, though, MSU affected UCLA for much of the first 20 minutes.
“I do think that threw us out of rhythm,” Close said. “We were running our plays a step outside of where we wanted to. When we did get the shots we wanted we knew we were going to get high post shots we knew (Billings) was going to be able to get jumpers and those didn’t go down. Some doubt crept in and at halftime that’s what we talked about. Your focus has to be on the present possession only, period.”
Close and Canada said the Bruins were calmer in the second half, which allowed them to execute at a higher level and to challenge the Bulldogs in the fourth quarter and cut the deficit to six points. Unfortunately for the Bruins, the halftime hole proved to be a little too steep.
“Vic Schaefer has always been a great defensive coach. (He is) one of the best in the country, no doubt about that,” Close said. “He’s passionate about it and their kids play reflecting his passion on the defensive end. We didn’t execute and maybe take advantages of some of the mismatches we thought we had but credit to their pressure. We weren’t able to move the ball and take advantage of those as smoothly as we would have wanted to which would have created some better rhythm and some higher-percentage shots.”
MSU senior guard Blair Schaefer praised the Bulldogs’ ability to follow the game plan after UCLA scored 31 points off turnovers and had 17 fast-break points in an 84-75 victory against Texas on Friday night. Against MSU, UCLA had 13 points off 11 MSU turnovers and had nine fast-break points.
“We really wanted to pack the paint and make sure we were sealing,” Blair Schaefer said. “We wanted to seal off of their point guard. She is very, very good, so we kind of related it to last year against (Washington’s) Kelsey Plum. It is a team effort and our point guards can’t do it by themselves, so we really just tried to make an effort to seal and make them shoot jump shots. They are a team that likes layups and transition buckets, so we felt like if we could take that away we would have a good chance of winning.”
Follow Dispatch sports editor Adam Minichino on Twitter @ctsportseditor
Adam Minichino is the former Sports Editor for The Commercial Dispatch.
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