Sports
The good, the bad and the ugly: Are Liverpool back to their best?
Liverpool came into the season as slight Premier League favorites, but it’s hard to remember a preseason favorite surrounded by so many question marks.
There was the tragic death of Diogo Jota — a not-to-be-quantified loss that affected and is still affecting the team in ways we can’t begin to understand. And then there was everything else, too.
Liverpool lost Trent Alexander-Arnold, perhaps the greatest passer of the ball to ever walk the Earth, to Real Madrid. The pressing-and-pirouetting prowess of Luis Díaz departed for Bayern Munich. The guaranteed chaos and chance creation of Darwin Núñez left for Saudi Arabia. Oh, and a number of reliable backups found new homes, too: Harvey Elliott to Aston Villa, Kostas Tsimikas to AS Roma, Jarell Quansah to Bayer Leverkusen and Caoimhín Kelleher to Brentford.
Of course, plenty of talent came the other way. Liverpool set the Premier League transfer record twice, first for Florian Wirtz from Bayer Leverkusen, then for Alexander Isak from Newcastle United. The seemingly Isak-esque Hugo Ekitike was signed from Eintracht Frankfurt. A pair of young new fullbacks joined: Wirtz’s Leverkusen teammate Jeremie Frimpong and AFC Bournemouth‘s Milos Kerkez. A gigantic teenage center back from Parma, Giovanni Leoni, signed to replace Quansah. And Kelleher’s replacement, Giorgi Mamardashvili, officially joined after a year on loan at Valencia.
For a team that moonwalked to a Premier League title and took the eventual UEFA Champions League winners to penalties last season, that’s a lot of turnover. We knew that the previous roster was good enough to win the league and compete for the European Cup. Given the reputations of the players acquired and Liverpool’s player-acquisition prowess, we could predict that the new roster would also be good enough to do both, but we couldn’t know it.
After five Premier League matches, it seemed like we knew the answer. Liverpool won all five and quickly built a five-point lead over second place, tied for the biggest lead at that point in the season in league history. And then, after nine games, we knew the new answer, which was the opposite of the first answer: they lost four straight matches for the first time in four years, and suddenly found themselves seven points back of league-leading Arsenal.
The season was over — and then they played their two best games of the season, a 2-0 victory over Aston Villa and a 1-0 smothering of a near-full-strength Real Madrid. While all of the new signings seemed to lay the foundation for the next version of Liverpool, the club might’ve turned a corner by going back to what they were doing last year.
How bad have Liverpool been so far?
Here’s how the Premier League stacks up by adjusted goal difference, my preferred team-strength metric: a blend of 70% xG and 30% goals.
You’ve got Arsenal alone out front, then Manchester City alone in second, then Liverpool bunched up with a group of teams that includes Crystal Palace, Chelsea and Brighton & Hove Albion.
If we break that down by offense and defense, here’s how Liverpool compare across the past two seasons:
– Adjusted goals scored: 2.22 in 2024-25, 1.75 in 25-26
– Adjusted goals conceded: 1.04 in 2024-25, 1.29 in 25-26
If we cut out the final four games of last season, after Liverpool clinched the title and when the players and manager were partying in other countries instead of practicing, then Liverpool’s adjusted goals conceded drops down to 0.88.
Now, their schedule has been quite difficult. Per the betting-market-implied power ratings from Pitch Rank, Liverpool have played eight of the 12 best teams in the Premier League, and the two games against clubs outside the top 12 were both on the road.
But that’s still not enough to explain the gap between last year and this year. There’s simply been a significant decline — on both ends of the field.
What made them worse?
Given that the manager is still Arne Slot, it makes sense to look into the personnel changes as the main driver in the difference between this season and last season. Here’s the percentage of Premier League minutes played by all the departed players last season:
– Díaz: 70.1%
– Alexander-Arnold: 69.2%
– Jota: 35.0%
– Núñez: 33.1%
– Kelleher: 26.3%
– Tsimikas: 24.5%
– Quansah: 14.5%
– Elliott: 10.8%
And here’s how it looks for the new guys:
– Kerkez: 73.3%
– Wirtz: 67.4%
– Ekitike: 64.1%
– Mamardashvili: 40.0%
– Isak: 27.9%
– Frimpong: 9.6%
– Leoni: 0.0%
Beyond all of the ins and outs, there have been significant changes among the players who were on the team last season, too. Cody Gakpo has played 88% of the league minutes after featuring in little more than half of the minutes last year. Dominik Szoboszlai has played every minute after about three-quarters of the minutes last season. And Conor Bradley has leapt up to about half of the minutes after playing just over 20% last year.
And then, in the other direction, Andrew Robertson has seen the biggest fall-off: just over a quarter of the minutes after playing nearly 75% of the time last season. And while there are no other major downshifts, there have been a number of minor declines in the same area of the field. Midfielders Ryan Gravenberch (from 90-plus percent down to about 75%), Curtis Jones (half the minutes to just over a third), and Alexis Mac Allister (about 75%, down to just over 60%) have all been on the field less often.
So, broadly speaking, this new and significantly worse version of Liverpool has featured a number of different things: a left back other than Robertson; a full back other than Alexander-Arnold; a midfield frequently without Mac Allister, Jones or Gravenberch; Gakpo being the ever-present left winger; and a new center forward.
There’s always going to be a new center forward, and Alexander-Arnold isn’t walking through that door again after a brief return on Tuesday, but Liverpool’s return to form in the past two matches has coincided with changes to a bunch of those changes. Robertson started both matches; last season’s backup right back, Bradley, did the same on the other side. The midfield of Szoboszlai, Mac Allister and Gravenberch played every minute except for the few when Jones replaced Mac Allister against Madrid. And Gakpo only played about half of the minutes — or about as much as he did last season.
How much change is too much change?
If you look at Liverpool’s major personnel decisions over the past 10 months, they don’t really make a lot of sense together. They signed their two 30-plus superstars, Virgil van Dijk and Mohamed Salah, to big-money contract extensions. They weren’t able to keep their 27-year-old superstar, Alexander-Arnold. And then they signed outfield players this past summer who are currently 26, 24, 23, 22, 21 and 18.
In other words, they have two more years to get the most out of arguably the two best players at their positions in Premier League history. And they did just spend more money on transfer fees in a single window than any club in the history of the sport. However, the majority of that money went to players who still aren’t even in those prime years between 24 and 28 — Isak, 26, is the only one who really fits the Salah and Van Dijk timeline.
Instead, it seems like they tried to build the next great Liverpool team while also hoping that those players would all be able to contribute to the final years of the current great Liverpool team. But the foundation of even the strongest team can handle only so many changes at once.
Soccer is a game of interdependencies — little relationships all across the field that ultimately produce whatever it is that we think of as a team’s style or tactics.
2:01
Slot: An impressive win over an incredible Real Madrid side
Arne Slot heaps praise on Liverpool’s performance, especially Conor Bradley, following their crucial 1-0 win over Real Madrid in the Champions League.
Liverpool won the league last season with a more controlled approach than the one they had under Jürgen Klopp. They didn’t dominate field position as much as they had in the past, they didn’t press as aggressively, and they became a better defensive team despite allowing the opposition into their attacking third more often. They were also able to play this way because they had a generational passing talent in Alexander-Arnold, and the best player in the world for large stretches of the season in Salah — two players who can create the same number of opportunities even if you give them fewer possessions.
However, they were also able to play this way because of their midfield, the one area where Slot made a major personnel change by installing Gravenberch as a play-every-minute stalwart at the base. While you wouldn’t call any of the three midfielders elite passers or defenders, they were all good enough at just about every aspect of playing midfield: passing, moving, carrying, pressing and recovering. This allowed Liverpool to defend deep, press high, spring fast attacks or develop measured long-string possessions.
But then they lost Alexander-Arnold and his passing from deep. Salah got a year older. Wirtz came into the midfield and made it much more one-dimensional. Kerkez slid in as the new left back and while he can run, he’s nowhere near the passer Robertson is. Rather than being a sometimes contributor who mostly crashed the back post, Gakpo turned into a high-touch, high-volume winger as a starter. And whoever is playing up top now, neither one of them can press as well as Jota, Díaz or Núñez.
When you make one change — say, losing Alexander-Arnold — you can figure out how to account for it elsewhere on the field because everything else is staying the same. But Liverpool lost Alexander-Arnold, replaced Robertson, stopped using last season’s midfield, turned a backup winger into a starting winger, and completely revamped the center-forward spot — all at the same time.
It’s impossible to understand how all of those changes will affect each other, but the clear result was a team that both couldn’t control the ball like it used to and couldn’t defend like it used to. For all of the attacking talent on the field, Liverpool couldn’t work the ball into the final third as consistently as they did last season, so they generated fewer shots and fewer touches inside the box.
And then when they lost the ball, all the opposition had to do was hoof it long and profit. (Liverpool have faced 62 long balls per 90 minutes this season — a 15-pass increase since last season, and the most any team has faced in any of the past four Premier League campaigns.)
The lineup Slot used against Madrid, though, feels like the right amount of incremental change to keep this team competitive. This was against one of the five best teams in the world, and the performance was even better than the result:
The midfield of Mac Allister, Szoboszlai and Gravenberch is the only area of the team where all of the players are at or right before their prime years. It was a strength last year and it should continue to be, especially with Szobszlai looking like he might now be one of the best players in the Premier League. That trio makes Liverpool just robust enough without the ball that they don’t have to totally dominate possession to stand a chance, but the group is also technical enough to dominate possession.
Across the back four, the center backs are automatic choices at this point. Perhaps because of the solidity provided by the midfield, Bradley had his two best games of the season — able to make runs forward to open up space for Salah, or to carry the ball forward as a means of ball progression. On the left, I’m not sure Robertson can play every game, but he remains a better option than Kerkez, who still is something of a wild card in possession and doesn’t complement Bradley quite as well on the other side.
Across the front three, Wirtz might not get the shots for himself that Gakpo does, but he’s so much more secure with the ball at his feet. Playing him as part of the midfield turns Liverpool into a much more open transition-fest; playing him in addition to the midfield makes the team even more secure with the ball and just opens up all kinds of new opportunities to create chances. It’s worth noting that Wirtz didn’t take a shot against Madrid, but he created five chances and was on the field for almost all 17 of Liverpool’s shots.
While Salah likely will never replicate what he did last season, he has shown some signs of life over the previous two matches, too. After attempting 19 take-ons and completing just four over the first 11 Premier and Champions League games, he attempted 18 and completed 10 against Madrid and Villa. Last year, Liverpool’s pass maps were heavily slanted toward Salah and Alexander-Arnold. Maybe what we saw on Tuesday is what’s needed to get the most out of Salah from here on out:
Now, this isn’t to say that all is fixed. It’s only two games. The team still seems über reliant on the presence of Gravenberch to make the midfield work. Frimpong would be a totally different proposition than Bradley, who hasn’t been able to stay healthy so far in his young career. It’s November and Salah’s attacking output is half of what it was last season. This setup squeezes out either Isak or Ekitike, and who knows what’ll happen if Van Dijk or Ibrahima Konaté get injured.
On top of that, Villa and Madrid really didn’t test Liverpool’s apparent weakness against the long ball. And it’s unlikely that Manchester City will either on Sunday.
But the team we’ve seen in the past couple of games just makes way more sense than what we saw over the first three chaotic months of the season. That was a completely different team than the one that did so well last year. And while this current iteration does still feel different, it’s more of an evolution from last season, rather than something totally new.
I doubt, too, that this is what anyone at the club had in mind come the end of the summer. Otherwise, well, we probably would’ve seen some version of this XI from the jump. You don’t sign two strikers and an attacking midfielder if your long-term plan is to play a formation where the attacking midfielder slot is already occupied and there’s room for only one forward. This setup only really has room for two of the five new outfield signings. But the reality of the situation is that Salah and Van Dijk are still on the team, the midfield Slot chose last season was too good to break up, and it was really hard to watch Tuesday’s match and not see a group of 11 players who could challenge for another Champions League title.
So, for now, Liverpool might have to look backward in order to go forward. There’s a new version of this team hidden somewhere inside this roster, one that gets most of the new guys on the field together and plays at a high level. But it’s already November, and we still haven’t seen it.
As for the team that played against Madrid? We already know most of them are good enough.
The ball is tipped
And there you are
You’re running for your life
You’re a shooting star
David Barrett was sitting in a bar when the idea came to him. The 31-year-old musician had spent his entire young adult life grinding as a performer in the watering holes of Michigan. College bars. Dive bars. Even the occasional honky tonk. On this particular spring night in 1986, it was an East Lansing establishment known as the Varsity Inn and his set — a performance heard by perhaps two dozen patrons — was done.
And all the years
No one knows
Just how hard you worked
But now it shows
Barrett was unwinding over a drink. With one eye he watched the TV over the bar, watching Larry Bird’s Boston Celtics running over another unfortunate NBA opponent. His other eye was affixed on the woman who had served him that drink.
“The waitress was so beautiful, I thought, well, I’m a songwriter, so perhaps my only chance to catch her attention was through poetry,” Barrett says today. “If I could express to her the poetry of Larry Bird’s abilities at the height of his career, this special moment in his life creating so many special moments on the court, perhaps she would be impressed.”
Well, was she?
“No, she was rather busy.”
No offense to Barrett, but we should all be thankful that she had more critical tasks than posting up at the bar to admire the singer’s basketball spoken word. Because it was within that space of lonely time that, inspired by his own lesson about moments, he scribbled three words onto a cocktail napkin. The following morning, he expanded those words into a chorus, this time onto a stack of napkins at a brunch spot, The Knight Cap Too.
In one shining moment,
it’s all on the line
One shining moment,
there frozen in time
For nearly 40 years, those lyrics and the tune Barrett wrote to accompany them have been the soundtrack of our college basketball lives. On Monday night, shortly after the men’s college basketball national champion is crowned, the winning team will lock arms on the floor of Lucas Oil Stadium, gaze up at the jumbotron and soak up a three-minute montage of clips from this year’s tournament, set to Barrett’s song, building to the inevitable 30-second climax of images of them winning the very title that they are very much still celebrating.
“There are so many moments that make up a championship celebration,” explains Mike Krzyzewski, who won five national titles as Duke’s head coach. “There’s the moment the game ends. There’s hugging your family. There’s cutting down the nets. The moment of being handed the trophy. But the moment it feels real is when they play ‘One Shining Moment.'”
“It’s this literal life-flashing-before-your-eyes thing, watching that video set to that song,” adds John Calipari, who won it all with Kentucky in 2012. “It’s like watching a movie of your life, that you wrote, with the people who wrote it with you.”
“You also don’t just watch it if you win it,” says Tom Izzo, who celebrated with Michigan State in 2000. “If you are there at the game, you wait to see it. If you are home on the sofa, you wait to see it. The season isn’t done until you hear that song.”
And to think, the NFL almost intercepted it right out from under college basketball’s nose.
For that moment, let’s go back to ’86. That’s when Barrett met sports reporter Armen Keteyian. Keteyian, like Barrett, was a native of the Detroit area and had moved to New York to write for Sports Illustrated. Whenever Barrett went East, he’d stay at Keteyian’s apartment. During one of those visits, the two were watching the NBA Finals on TV — Larry Bird again, doing work against the Houston Rockets — and Barrett mentioned his basketball song from the napkins.
Keteyian told Barrett that if he got the song recorded, he’d love to hear it.
A few weeks later, a cassette was waiting in Keteyian’s mailbox, tracks laid down in a make-do studio used for local advertising jingles. The reporter loved it, so he walked the tape over to a colleague in TV production.
“One day my phone rang and the gentleman on the other end said he was Doug Towey and he was the creative director at CBS Sports,” Barrett recalls now, his throat catching to hold back tears. “Of course, I didn’t believe him at first. He sounded like a buddy of mine pulling a prank. But over the next 15 minutes, I made a friend for life over a phone call that changed my life.”
Towey, a sports television legend — the theme music for The Masters, the iconic CBS Sports college sports themes, you name it and Towey was probably behind it — had fallen in love with the song and told Barrett that he really, really wanted to use it for … Super Bowl XXI?
“Yes, it was a basketball song, but you know what you do not do in that situation?” Barrett says. “You do not say no to CBS. Why yes, Doug Towey, please use my song for the Super Bowl!”
CBS even flew Barrett out to Pasadena to watch the matchup between John Elway’s Denver Broncos and Lawrence Taylor’s New York Giants. During his postgame report, sportscaster Brent Musburger even quoted the song. “The New York Giants, their first Super Bowl triumph, a shining moment they will never forget…” The time had arrived. Barrett’s big break was happening!
But it never ran. The Super Bowl-winning Giants were a little too chatty in their postgame locker room interviews, so the broadcast ran long, and time ran out. Barrett was crushed — until a second call from Towey.
“He said they wanted to use it for March Madness,” Barrett’s voice nearly explodes as he tells the story. “So, my little song about basketball, you know what? It figured out a way to make sure it was still a basketball song.”
On March 30, 1987, “One Shining Moment” made its debut in the most perfectly shiny momentous manner.
Indiana’s Keith Smart had stroked a drifting corner jump shot with four seconds remaining to defeat Syracuse for the championship. CBS Sports editors scrambled to add nine shots from that game to the end of the montage they had already pieced together throughout the month. The seventh of those images was Smart’s dagger.
From a clunky makeshift video edit room next to the CBS production truck in the bowels of the Superdome, the instant those shots were added, the videotape was popped and sprinted by hand via a panicked young producer to the end of that truck, where tape machines had just spent hours turning around instant replays and interview clips for the telecast. It got crammed into one of those machines, cued, and ready to play.
Once again, it was Musburger who did the lead-in honors. And this time it aired.
“The idea of the song, that one moment can change everything. Well, that’s what happened to me in that moment,” says Barrett, who has since composed themes for CBS, ABC and PBS, melodic backdrops for the Olympics, U.S. Open tennis, the PGA Championship, and a documentary about C.S. Lewis. He’s won two Emmys.
His go-to joke now is to say: “After all those years, suddenly I had talent!”
Since that night, CBS Sports and now TNT have aired 38 editions of “One Shining Moment” performed by four different singers. Barrett himself did the honors over the first seven editions before Towey recruited Philadelphia soul legend Teddy Pendergrass for a new version. Bennett’s vocals returned in 2000, along with a bluesier overhaul of the tune. Two years after that, Barrett received another call from Towey, asking how he’d feel if Luther Vandross were to give the song a spin. Barrett said of course and asked when it would happen. Towey, clearly having already made up his mind before the call, told Barrett that Vandross was slated to be in the studio that very night.
Vandross laid down his vocals in the winter of 2002, captured by CBS cameras to be intercut with the hoops highlights in true music video fashion. The following spring Vandross suffered a massive stroke that forever altered his voice, meaning that “One Shining Moment” was the final song recorded by the legendary artist.
It has been Luther’s song ever since, with the exception of 2010, when Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson’s rendition was beloved for its sound but criticized because the internet claimed it was imbalanced, with too much of her and not enough college basketball. (At 3:12, it’s only a few seconds longer than average, and Hudson is featured for a total of about eight seconds.)
Screening all 38 editions of “One Shining Moment” (thanks, Internet!) is a history lesson not just on college basketball, but television production. Grainy standard definition video transitions into 4K HD as majestically as the images of 1980s feathered hairstyles morph into low burst fades. The production process has evolved not unlike the game being played on the floor of the arena. Digitized and fast-paced, with the ability to be nimble on the fly like UConn and Michigan on the break. But the spirit of how it is pieced together hasn’t changed at all.
“We have a dedicated team that travels to the Final Four. They are on site,” explains Drew Watkins, SVP and Creative Director of TNT Sports, from the sprawling TV production compound that sits outside the south gate of Lucas Oil Stadium.
Watkins has been with TNT since 2000; before that he was an entry-level producer at ESPN. On Monday night, he will be keeping an eye on his on-site producer and editor, George Adams and Chris Vining.
“They’re in one of our edit trucks and are linked in with the studio and the game production truck,” Watkins says of how it will all go down as the clock ticks down on the title game. “So, when we’re editing those plays, and we’re filling in those last few moments and winners are being decided and ‘One Shining Moment’ is minutes away from airing, there is a team on site in the TV compound that is putting those shots together, talking to the broadcast trucks to make sure everything is on track.”
There will actually be two edit suites running simultaneously, just in case. Because all it takes is one power outage, one video glitch or one computer deciding that it’s a great time for a restart, to turn the dream of Barrett’s song into one nightmare moment. Redundancy is a producer’s best friend. No one wants to be the person who ended a four-decade streak of making air.
“The good news is that we have backups in place,” Watkins said. “The better news is that nobody’s having to pop a tape and run it across a parking lot anymore.”
Once that final shot is added and the final click of the mouse sends the finished product to the truck, Adams, Vining, Watkins and their colleagues make sure to pause and watch their work go out into the world, collapsed back into the chairs of their respective production trucks, just like the 20-plus million viewers at home.
Meanwhile, the viewing of “One Shining Moment” as it airs on the arena’s big screen always feels downright intimate, even on a tiny basketball floor situated in the center of a 70,000-seat NFL stadium-turned-basketball gym.
That’s the part that chokes up Krzyzewski, Calipari and Izzo when they talk about it. The part that former players always remember as the pinnacle of their first minutes as champions.
On Monday night, the man who brought us the song will be right there with them. Because it’s his favorite part, too: David Barrett’s literal “One Shining Moment.”
“People ask me all the time which ‘One Shining Moment’ is my favorite one to watch, but I can’t answer that. That’s impossible,” he said on Saturday morning as he prepared to attend the semifinal games with his wife, Tracy. (No, she’s not the waitress from East Lansing, though that server, Jan Shoemaker, and Barrett were eventually reunited through a mutual friend.)
Tracy is a Michigan alum, and she and David still live in the Detroit area, where they raised two girls. As soon as they arrived in Indianapolis, they purchased some Block M Final Four gear before they witnessed the Wolverines’ devastation of the Arizona Wildcats to officially become the favorites to win the national title.
“No, I do not have a favorite ‘One Shining Moment,'” Barrett repeated. Then he laughed. “But Monday night, if we get to watch the home team watch themselves celebrate a championship, set to my little basketball song, well…”
That would be a moment.
“Yes, it would.”
INDIANAPOLIS — Duke star freshman Cameron Boozer, a projected top-five pick in the 2026 NBA draft, said he suffered multiple fractures around one of his eyes during his team’s loss to UConn in the Elite Eight.
Boozer did not offer specifics about the injury but said he decided against surgery only two months before the NBA draft.
“I have a couple of fractures, but I’m all good,” Boozer said as he accepted The Associated Press and United States Basketball Writers Association player of the year awards. “I’m just going through the healing process. It hurt in the game, but I wish the outcome would have been better, but that’s not really what I’m here to focus on. We had a great year. Like I said, it’s an individual award, but I wouldn’t be here without my teammates and my coaches.”
During Duke’s 73-72 loss to UConn on March 29 — decided on Braylon Mullins‘ 3-pointer with 0.4 seconds to play — Boozer took an elbow to the face as he drove to the rim on 7-foot-1 center Eric Reibe. Soon after the play, Boozer’s right eye began to swell and a Duke trainer applied a soda can to his face while he sat on the bench.
Depending on its severity, the eye injury could impact Boozer’s standing in the NBA draft. He is one of the most decorated players in college basketball history, but he has faced scrutiny about whether he has the next-level physical tools to compete against bigger, stronger and more athletic players in the NBA.
The 6-9, 250-pound forward said he is ready to “win” in the NBA, no matter where he’s picked.
“I think I’m just a winning player, all-around player. I think I impact the game in so many different ways,” Boozer said. “And I think my competitiveness translates to any level. I think any team who takes a chance on me is going to be very happy with the results they get from it.”
Boozer admitted that he had a lot of emotions accepting awards in Indianapolis, the site of this year’s Final Four, a week after his team had been eliminated by the Huskies, who will face Michigan in the national title game Monday night. But those emotions were secondary to his feelings after his twin brother, Cayden Boozer, faced backlash on social media following his turnover that preceded Mullins’ game-winning shot in the loss.
“First of all, I’d like to say it’s definitely nasty, but that’s not the reason, that one play is not the reason we lost,” Cameron Boozer said. “But just being there for him, obviously it’s tough. It’s going to be hard for anyone to go through that. There is not really that much I can say to make him feel better. We’re all hurting as a team, but we’re going to get through it together. We’re a super-connected group. It’s definitely a hard moment, but he’s a tough guy. We’re all tough. It’s going to make us so much better going forward. So it’s something you’ve got to take on a chin and learn and grow from.”
Sports
Dawn Staley gives classy answer after Geno Auriemma question following national title loss: ‘It’s UCLA’s day’
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South Carolina head coach Dawn Staley was disappointed how the Gamecocks’ season ended on Sunday afternoon in Phoenix, a 79-51 loss to the UCLA Bruins in the national championship game.
During her post-game interview, Staley was asked about what happened in the Gamecocks’ prior Final Four matchup against UConn, where she and head coach Geno Auriemma had a tense exchange after South Carolina advanced to the title game for the third year in a row.
Rather than hash out more of her thoughts, Staley had a classy response.
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Head coach Dawn Staley of the South Carolina Gamecocks watches during the first half of the NCAA women’s basketball championship game against the UCLA Bruins at Mortgage Matchup Center in Phoenix, Ariz., on April 5, 2026. (Ben Solomon/NCAA Photos)
“I don’t want – this is UCLA’s day, right? Let’s keep it UCLA, them winning the national championship,” Staley told reporters, via The Athletic. “… We’re not going to damper UCLA’s day with it.”
Before this national title contest, Staley was spotted having a cordial experience greeting UCLA Bruins head coach Cori Close — a much different experience than how Friday night ended with Auriemma.
After the Gamecocks defeated the Huskies, Staley and Auriemma went viral with their interaction at midcourt, where Auriemma appeared to enrage Staley before walking off.
This time, Staley and Close hugged and shared a few words. During the exchange, Staley “looked around afterward like, ‘see??’”, per NBC Sports.
Staley was showing a bit of sarcasm, as she noted Auriemma didn’t shake her hand before the Final Four tipped off between the two teams on Friday night.
After the Gamecocks’ victory over the Huskies, Staley was asked what exactly happened with Auriemma, though she tried to explain her focus in helping her team lock in for the national title game. If they won, it would’ve been the fourth national championship in the last 10 years for South Carolina.
Head coach Cori Close of the UCLA Bruins watches during the first quarter against the South Carolina Gamecocks in the NCAA women’s basketball national championship at Mortgage Matchup Center in Phoenix, Ariz., on April 5, 2026. (Christian Petersen/Getty Images)
“For me, no distractions at this time. I’m concentrating on winning a national championship, that’s it,” Staley said at the time. “That’s a little disheartening. This is sports, sometimes things like this happen. Continue to focus on my team and ability to advance in this tournament and hopefully win another national championship.”
UCONN’S UNDEFEATED SEASON CRUMBLES AS SOUTH CAROLINA GETS SWEET REVENGE AGAINST REIGNING CHAMPS
Auriemma later released a statement, apologizing for his behavior after the loss.
“There’s no excuse for how I handled the end of the game vs. South Carolina. It’s unlike what I do and what our standard is here at Connecticut,” the Hall of Fame coach said in a statement on Saturday. “I want to apologize to the staff and the team at South Carolina. It was uncalled for in how I reacted. The story should be how well South Carolina played, and I don’t want my actions to detract from that. I’ve had a great relationship with their staff, and I sincerely want to apologize to them.”
Staley added she had “no idea” why Auriemma was angry after the game, though she guessed perhaps he was ticked off by the lack of handshake before the game on his own end. Either way, Staley was moving forward.
UCLA Bruins head coach Cori Close shakes hands with South Carolina Gamecocks head coach Dawn Staley after defeating South Carolina 79-51 in the NCAA women’s championship game at Mortgage Matchup Center in Phoenix, Ariz., on April 4, 2026. (Ronaldo Bolaños/Los Angeles Times)
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“I don’t know what he came with after the game, but, hey, sometimes things get heated. We move on,” she said.
For UCLA, it was the first time the women’s basketball program has won the national title, as their emotional celebration ensued following the game in Phoenix.
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